Silly me misinterpreted the output of my testsnippet,
so fool me for that ;)

Thanx to all answers especially Joost warning about
using $a !

To tell the whole story read this:

I am working on a cgi producing a two framed set. the
left frame is showing a dynamically list of links,
which should be anchored to jump to the letter you
want by clicking on a link at the right frame.

so here's what I experimented with:

 for $loop (1 .. $last_id) {
  for $count ( 97 .. 122) {
   $bla=chr($count);
   if ( ($list[1+($loop-1)*2]=~/^$bla/i) and (! $$bla) ) {
    $$bla="<a name=\"$bla\"></a>\n";
    print $$bla;
   }
  }
 }
[download]

I intend to puplish the whole code when it's finished
an working. It is a database for managing your
video-cds.

--
there are no silly questions
killerhippy