A couple of thoughts further to ELISHEVA's comments.

• The normal convention is to use x to represent left and right and y for up and down. You might want to swap your $x and $y to avoid confusion.

• Rather than employing a for loop to iterate over every line you want to print, consider printing your "solid" top border then using the for to iterate over 2 fewer lines than your total y dimension whilst printing the "hollow" lines then finally printing the "solid" bottom border. That way, you have no need to detect where you are in the loop.

• Consider putting this code in a subroutine, passing your dimensions as arguments (see perlsub) as a further learning exercise. Think about doing some basic validation, e.g. how would you cope with a negative or non-numeric dimension?

I hope these thoughts are helpful.

Cheers,

JohnGG