At the risk of sounding redundant, wouldn't perl -w catch the use of $avg when undefined, thereby making the debugging easier? All the debug tips are great, but the best one is letting perl debug for you with use strict; and -w.

On a stylistic note, you might want to scope your variables like this:
my ($a, $b, $c, $d);
Instead of this:
my $a; my $b; my $c; my $d;
This should help keep your code from getting diluted with relatively less important text. (The computation is more important than the declarations, so it should also take up more space on screen to help focus your mind.)

-Ted

In reply to At the risk of sounded redundant... by tedv
in thread Still confused by yabba

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.