Ah yes, the perennial "I want to do X without using way every sane programmer does X" question.

my @list = qw( 4 30 2 54 1 2 );
print "Which of these numbers is the largest:\n", join( "\n", @list ),
+ "\n";
chomp( my $max = <STDIN> );
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See also the mechanical turk. For the saner answer, see max in List::Util.