in reply to Error while taking 'Scalar of scalar'

my @color= qw(  lavender lightblue honeydew);
my $color_no=int(rand($#color));
return $color[$color_no];

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have you ever wondered why you only get back the first two colors? rand(x) returns a random number between 0 and (excluding) x.

the usual idiom for this in perl is: 

my @colors = qw(lavender lightblue honeydew);
my $color = $colors[rand @colors];
return $color;

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Re^2: Error while taking 'Scalar of scalar'
by bart (Canon) on Jul 05, 2007 at 12:39 UTC
    my $color = $colors[rand @colors];
    Or 
    my $color = $colors[int rand @colors];

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    which does the exact same thing, but doesn't depend on the knowledge that numbers used as array indexes are truncated to integer, instead of rounded.
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