First off, in your first line you're defining an array "@words" when what I think you want is a hash, "%words". Below, in the "$words{$name}" part, that wouldn't work as a lookup with the array @words, which is what you have now. Change the "@" to a "%" and your code should work.

I guess the thing to learn here is that problems aren't always obvious. If you start developing your scripts with use strict; and  perl -wT it will initially seem like a pain in the butt (but) problems like this will just pop out at you.

Good luck!

Here's your "llama" code, fixed.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;

my(%words,$name,$secretword,$words,$guess);

%words=qw(
    fred  camel
    barney  llama
    betty  alpaca
    wilma  alpaca
);
print "What is your name?\n";
$name=<STDIN>;
chomp ($name);
if ($name eq "Randal")
{
    print "Hello, Randal! Welcome!\n"
} else {
    print "Hello $name.\n";
    $secretword=$words{$name};       # use {} for hash
    if ($secretword eq ""){          # gives me an error around here
        $secretword="stupid";      #default secret word
    }
    print "What is the secret word?";
    $guess =<STDIN>;
    chomp($guess);
    while ($guess ne $secretword){
        print "Wrong, try again.\n";
        $guess=<STDIN>;
        chomp ($guess);
    }
}
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