Really interesting point, John

Of course, every single reply before yours gave me some things to consider, but I think that you really get a point here:

If you didn't look it up, you have no reason to suppose negative split limit does what it does, or even exists. It's an arbitrary factoid to remember.

The very nature of Perl to be like natural language--inconsistant and full of dwim and special cases--makes it impossible to know it all without simply memorizing the documentation (which is not complete or totally correct anyway).

I really feared that.

In the beginning of my Perl experience I started reading all the Camel Book; so, in theory, I should have known almost everything of every function. In practice, all construct that I never used, or that I tested with sample code but never used in practice, have disappeared; probabily, my brain simply discarded them as "not useful"

Gee! Is it time to start reading the whole Camel Book again? Maybe the thing I know now will give a new light to it...

Thanks everybody!
--bronto

PS: You are going to be in my new signature :-)

# Another Perl edition of a song:
# The End, by The Beatles
END {
  $you->take($love) eq $you->make($love) ;
}