Thanks to Corion and tybalt89 for their answers - I was nearly there with the former's suggestion with my playing but the latter suggestion would never have crossed my mind as it ('normal' programming language-wise) looks like a completely foreign language - shades of using APL in my past!!!
BTW when I said that it threw our system's operation, it wasn't as bad as that (we are testing changes on a non-live system) but it threw our development/testing environment because we couldn't even get it to start due to the non-interpretation of the new script with the Perl version being used. We do know what we are doing.
Again many thanks for the assistance.
ADB