Thank you, Dragonchild. It's nice to know my scripts work because they follow the language definition, rather than because they make the same mistake everybody else makes. Still, I can't help feeling, that if the page writers had spend less time demonstrating that Perl is ill-suited for C-style programming, they might have found the time to instead come up with something more explicite.

Anyway, nearly all my questions on Perl design solved.
Thanks again. (PHM)