Well, I'm not sure I agree.

Knowing your perlvars is what I *thought* was the moral of the story initially, which is what I burnt those five minutes on, rather than spotting the <INPUT> problem. Or did I misunderstand you?

I do agree that knowing the perlvars is important, for reading other's code. But that doesn't mean you can't use English in your own code, to be nice to others less enlightened / experienced.

Ultimately it's a judgement call though, I suppose. If you happen to know there are a lot of new hires coming on to a project that are transitioning from some other language to perl, then it might ease the transition to use English for a while. I mean, that's why it's there. TIMTOWTDI and all that :)