The "..." is in Perl 5 only to make the sed-to-perl translator more accurate. It's not expected the most people would use it. Note also that either kind of scalar range operator is going away in Perl 6 in favor of a flipflop() function or some such. "$a..$b" will always produce a range list, and "$a..." will mean the same as "$a..Inf" (meaning you shouldn't use it where it will get flattened, unless you have a lot of memory...)