Thank you, yes, that makes perfect sense. Ghu, I was tearing my hair out over this one; I knew that it had to be something simple and obvious, I just couldn't see it. Thanks again.

If it makes you feel any better, I've been programming in Perl for about 9 years, and still, to this day, context-related bugs are the ones that trip me the most often, even though I learned about Perl's contexts from day 1 basically (I learned Perl by reading the 1st ed. of the Camel book, which covered contexts in depth). Just recently I read japhy's nice article on lists and arrays, and it made me feel like a newbie. It's ironic that a feature that is meant to make Perl more human-language-like trips me most often. I must have Vulcan blood or something.