I must admit, aside from making an ass of myself :), I've never seen open with a dot concatting the elements... either the 3 arg form or the standard open(OUT,"<$something")..
I will now log off, shut down all the computers, and read many books. See you after the elections sometime.
I've never seen open with a dot concatting the elements
That's probably because it's a slightly silly thing to do. Especially when the < is already enclosed in double quotes. Quotes do interpolation, so there's no reason for an explicit concatenation.