Adding either of the two lines to your program will make Perl tell you what goes wrong:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

# or

use warnings;

[download]

The -w switch or use warnings; lets Perl tell you what it considers dodgy or unintended practice. For example, comparing two strings that don't look like numbers as numbers. Perl considers atob and atoc to be strings for example, which likely is not what you intended in the first place.

Adding the following line prohibits the use of barewords as strings, which even more likely prevents you from making mistakes like the one you did. In fact, it prevents so many mistakes like misspelling and reference errors, this line should be at the top of all your Perl programs:

use strict;

[download]

With that line, Perl tells you that:

Bareword "atob" not allowed while "strict subs" in use at ...

[download]

which is an immediate hint. Either declare atob as a subroutine, or use $atob, as you propably intended.

In reply to Re: if logic OR parentheses problem by Corion
in thread if logic OR parentheses problem by Ellhar

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • 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! —
  • 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:
    & &amp;
    < &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.