No one is telling you what to do. Someone tried to offer a formatting tip (in a friendly way even) to a person who appears to be a newbie, and someone else jumped all over him for daring to express an opinion about readable style, and I pointed out that there is such a thing as a most common opinion about Perl style (even though the common opinion in this case is actually different from what hardburn suggested). You can feel free to write your variables as totally random strings of characters. Since I don't have to maintain your code, I don't care.