I've come across an interesting twist. We were sent a Perl script by our vendor and when I tried to run it, it choked on one particular line.

This is what I got for an error message:

Bareword found where operator expected at prog.pl
 line 1544, near ") NE"
        (Missing operator before NE?)
syntax error at prog.pl line 1544, near ") NE "
syntax error at prog.pl line 1548, near "else"
Execution of dni aborted due to compilation errors.
[download]

This is what they are trying:

while (($var1 = index ($var2, $var3)) NE -1 )
[download]

Now, I didn't fully check things out and concluded that they had meant to do != instead of NE. I didn't realize that "ne" was a string comparison, not a numeric even though it looked like they were trying to do a numeric comparison. I substituted in != and everything ran fine. However, I had an email from tech support that the version of Perl I was looking at (ActivePerl 5.8.0) didn't like the "NE" and that I should put in "ne" instead. I did this and it worked just fine. The only versions of Perl that I've looked at have been 5.8.0 (Windows and Unix, same errors with the "NE"). I checked through the Camel book and only find "ne" not "NE." Is there really a difference between the two? or am I losing it? Is there something perhaps in later builds of 5.8.0 that would account for this issue? Any thoughts anyone?

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"Ex Libris un Peut de Tout"