What's wrong with this?

Just that Perl often Does What You Mean, doesn't mean you can just go try syntaxes you already know from other languages. If you want to do something you haven't done in Perl before, you should read documentation, because code like this is very unlikely to work. I suggeset you read the following documents:

• perllol
• perlreftut
• perlref
• perlsyn

Good luck finding out how Perl works.

Your code doesn't work for several reasons.

• Arrays are sized automatically in Perl, so with $foo[4], you're already using the fifth element of @foo. With $foo[4][8], you're using the ninth element of the array that is referenced to in the fifth element of @foo. To assign to @foo, use @foo.
• Anonymous array references are made with square brackets, not curlies. Perl does not have multidimentional arrays natively, but it can have arrays that hold references to other arrays. When not naming them, they are anonymous.
• Elements need to be separated with commas.

Here's an example matrix in Perl:

@foo = (
    [1, 2, 3],
    [4, 5, 6],
    [7, 8, 9]
);
print $foo[2][1]; # prints 8
[download]

- Yes, I reinvent wheels.
- Spam: Visit eurotraQ.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.