ikegami,
No. That's not what I meant at all and I admit that my argument was not complete. What I am saying is that you are not forced to declare @$ with my nor our because it starts with a punctuation character. If I had declared it with my, I would have realized my typo because I would have gotten an error. If I had declared it with our, I would have meant to create a global variable.

In other words, I understand that this is documented behavior but I don't like it. In a nutshell, if you make typos with variables starting with punctuation characters - you are on your own because they will silently spring into existance. I do really appreciate your response though because I was not parsing it the same way as perl which made even less sense :-)