Thanks (to all). Time for me to read use constant and use vars, some of the many Perlthings that I have not yet used in my past 3-4 years experience with Perl.

However...

We don't get concerned when we see 'shift' as a bare word.

I guess I didn't get bothered by that because shift is a core function in Perl, and it is used on an array. Only when the array is a special variable (@_) we can eliminate it and just type shift() or even shift. Personally, I like using all the parens and spell things out wherever possible. Makes code easy for me.

Thanks for the clarifications.