Just a few general style comments. First, get into the habit of starting your programs with:

use strict;
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at least until you understand when not to use it. I have not seen Lemay's book, but I trust it has a good explanation of use strict -- if not, discard it immediately. Second, drop the awful Perl-4 style:

&initarg;
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function calling syntax and use the modern style:

initarg();
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Third, lexicals are good. So replace:

foreach $i (@_) {
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with:

foreach my $i (@_) {
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Again, I trust Lemay describes why lexicals should generally be preferred to globals. Like the others, I recommend switching to learning perl. See merlyn's blog entry for an interesting example of a Perl beginner learning Perl in public from merlyn's excellent introductory work.