You are quite right about the join thing! I just wanted an example with a string and I didn't intend it to be a full blown join replacement!

See my reply to tilly for $a and $b.

I agree with you about having the initial value first, but I couldn't get it to work. Trying to prototype the subroutine as ($&@) meant that I couldn't call it for some reason.

If I try this :-

sub scalarmap ($&@)
{
    local ($a, $b) = ( shift );
    my $code = shift;
    foreach $b (@_)
    {
        $a = &$code;
    }
    return $a;
}

my @array = 1..10;
my $sum = scalarmap 0, {  $a + $b } @array;
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Then when I run it I get

  Array found where operator expected at scalarmap2.pl line 32, near "
+} "
        (Missing operator before  ?)
syntax error at scalarmap2.pl line 32, near "} @array"
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Which is puzzling...