Wow, thanks for the review - pointed out a lot of things I need to look over. Some of the bits I did because it's a timed exercise (working on global var + symrefs) but seems I made a lot of time-wasting mistakes as well (and just bad mistakes :D).

Incidentally using a hash, e.g. a dispatch table takes only a few more efforts than symrefs.

As to 1..$char? iterate $char times, what's wrong with that?

You're right, my mistake, I just corrected the original post.