Aloha Monks! So, I continue on my journey to understand Perl and I still get tripped up by the simplicity of it as I guess I am trying to do this the hard way. I picked up a Perl book and am working through the excercises. I eventually worked this out in a section on loops: 
use strict;

my $target = 12;
print "Guess my number.\n";

#my $guess = <STDIN>;  # Attempt 2 with the "next" statements below co
+mmented out.  This failed also.
print "Enter your guess: ";
#my $guess = <STDIN>;  Attempt 1 worked but had to enter the guess a s
+econd time on a new line before processing
my $guess;

while ( $guess = <STDIN>) {
    if ($guess == $target) {
        print "You guessed it!";
        last;
    }elsif ($guess > $target) {
        print "Your guess is too high.\n";
        #next; # Attempt 1 using this failed.
    }elsif ($guess < $target) {
        print "Your guess is too low.\n";
        #next; # Attempt 1 using this failed.
    }
    print "Enter your guess: ";
}

[download]
I'm puzzled as to why not declaring my $guess; as opposed to using  my $code = <STDIN>; didn't really work. Is it because by using this last statement confilicts with the  while ($guess = <STDIN>) statement? I've kept some comments in as they show my different attempts to make this work. Thank you for any advice you can offer on my problem. I'm sure there are leaner ways to design this program, but I am just trying to understand the variables here rather than make it lean and mean.

In reply to Regarding Declaring Variables by Tech77

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