in reply to Black Perl updated for Perl 5

Very cool.

The scan version no longer dumps core in 5.8.0, instead giving:

Can't modify constant item in read at poem line 2, near "select)"
but I'm not sure how to avoid it without the '$'.

As written, though you can now lose the parens on read(), and combine:

... read spell, $scan, select and tell us;

Hugo