Many thanks to antirice and NetWallah - their diagnosis is absolutely correct; and I have now a (little) better understanding of Perl's references

Using the $term->[0] syntax is the answer and I now assume that the print command was kinda "DWIM"ing the ref for me, but in the for loop it wasn't. A bit subtle for my present level of Perlishness 8-)... but on further reflection this would be because print is in list context - and of course the (-1..@{$term}) is scalar - Insight!

antirice... Data::Dumper printed as follows

$term is 120
$VAR1 = [
          '120'
        ];
[download]

... are the single quotes trying to tell me something?

and NetWallah... Thanks for that very revealing code snippet... I'll keep a copy of that to remind me of the various syntactic options re references. I've just re-read MJD's perlreftut and I think I see where I misunderstood the syntax.

cheers and thanks again... what a great resource Perl Monks is..... hagen.