I am writing the code in BBEDIT, a text editor, and then running it from the command line as an argument to the perl executable. All of my scripts run fine if I don't have any comments before, or in, the code.

an example:

%sushi = (
inari => "tofu", 
maguro => "tuna", 
ika => "squid",
tamago => "omelet",
sake => "salmon");

@english = values(%sushi);
@japanese = keys(%sushi);

foreach (@english) {
($japanese,$english) = each(%sushi); 
print ("$english => $japanese\n");
}
[download]

runs just fine, but if I add the line:

# script to swap keys and values in a hash

to the beginning, no go. The first thing I tried, thinking it was an end of line problem, was adding a semicolon to the end of my comment lines, but still no change. If I put that same comment line, no semicolon, at the end of the script, it runs just fine.

I am using Perl 5.6.0, which is what this machine came with.