Oh I know that. I used the strict description as you will hear "use strict" chanted to newbies all the time. When you use strict, you have to declare the variable (ie my) which in turn causes your situation.

I kind of figured you'd realised it wasn't strict that was the cause, I was really adding something I forgot to mention in my first post.

I actually want Perl to complain to me, so I sought out the strict pragma even before I started reading advice to use it.

I've spent a lot of time modifying other people's programs, and now that I'm writing my own code I need a little help from Perl so that I don't need to keep looking things up in the documentation.

Perl is also the only language I've used seriously that doesn't have strong type casting, which worries me a little at times. I guess I'm used to being able to tell whether a variable is a number or a string just from the prefix character (which is handy when reading unfamiliar or forgotten code).

I guess I'm used to being able to tell whether a variable is a number or a string just from the prefix character (which is handy when reading unfamiliar or forgotten code).

/me gives Wysardry the odd look.

You mean the Hungarian notation? You can do that in Perl just as well. In fact, there's no requirement in those other languages that the type inferred from your conventional prefix actually agrees with the actual declared type. Nothing prevents you from declaring an integer strFoo or a string pointer iBar. Because it's only a convention.

If you really feel the need for this kind of "self-documentaion", go ahead. Nothing is stopping you.