I've seen several posts here that advocate the use of $[ and $# in a list context, and I've been using it myself to make things easier in some of my solutions. I was thumbing through the back of the Camel book (3rd ed.), and it says that both $[ and $# are deprecated and should not be used in writing new scripts. Is this something I should be concerned about? I don't know much about the life cycle of a language - are deprecated features eventually removed? Are there any other special variables that will give me the same results? I know that I can work around not using these variables, but they afford a much more elegant solution.