I don't know what's going on, but let me give you a response to your cow orkers: let's suppose, worst-case scenario (and highly unlikely) that this is a bug in strict -- the claim that strict is "no good" is still silly (lots of good and useful software tools have bugs). It makes you *think* about your variables and how they're going to be scoped, rather than just splashing them anywhere, and possibly making tyops. I maintain a bunch of scripts that were written without strict in mind, and when things go wrong, tracking down the error is very very hard, because you have no idea where the variable was defined. IF, of course, one is so disciplined as to make the things that should be globals globals, and keep the things that should have local scope local, you won't run into problems. But why should you have to manage those issues yourself when there's a tool that manages that for you? It won't solve all your problems, but it will give you a huge head start on solving them over someone who *doesn't* use strict vars.

And note, that's just strict 'vars' ... you could go on about strict 'refs' and strict 'subs' too =)

Philosophy can be made out of anything. Or less -- Jerry A. Fodor