Yeah, if you use different delimiters you have to use the m. But he is not using different delimiters! If you run his code, you'll see it compiles fine. The parenthesis here just play their usual role: indicating precedence. They are not needed, but the don't change the meaning either, just as in: (3) + (4). So, all you have are strings on both sides of the binding operator. And Perl handles that just fine....

Abigail