Hi, I'm trying to learn Perl and every now and then I run into an error on a script that I think ought to be correct. I'm not sure if I have an obvious error somewhere or not but my IDE keeps saying there is an error at line 6 (error: Can't modify not in scalar assignment). I was thinking maybe my close parenthesis or semicolon at the end of the hash is off. However, modifying that line/area doesn't seem to fix things. I'm posting the code for some help please. 
!#/usr/bin/perl
%words = 
qw(Sarah cat
Bob dog
Ronald apple
Eric banana);
print "What is your name?";
$name = <STDIN>;
chomp ($name);
if ($name eq "Jerry") {
print "Hi, Jerry!   Have a good day!\n";}
else {print "Hello, $name!\n";    #normal greeting
$secretword = $words{$name};    #get the secret word
print "Guess the secret word.\n";
$guess = <STDIN>;
chomp ($guess);
while ($guess ne $secretword) {
print "I'm sorry.   That is not the correct word.   Please try again. 
+  What is the secret word?";
$guess = <STDIN>;
chomp ($guess);
    }
}

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In reply to Creating a Hash Syntax Error by ms238

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