in reply to Re: Re: What the @#%* lost again!
in thread problem opening and reading from a file

Well, I carefully worded it "all-caps words with a special meaning". BEGIN isn't a reserved word. However, you can use reserved words as file handles, as long as you quote them when appropriate:
#!/usr/bin/perl use strict; use warnings; open print => "/etc/passwd" or die; print while <print>; __END__

If you replace the => with a comma, the code above won't compile.

Abigail