It's not just you that thinks so: the ++ is useless. Thanks for pointing it out. It's a relic of a first thought (I think), where I counted up in a while loop. In the end, a for loop made more sense, but I kept incrementing $number just for fun. (Translation: I completely lost track of what I was doing there, but Perl was nice enough to Do What I Meant (TM) anyhow.