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Message: [QUOTE="Ron Garret, post: 4872024"] What does that have to do with what I asked? Yes, that is exactly the problem. Perl is not content with assigning semantics meaning to every single symbol on the keyboard, it *overloads* those symbols, so even if you *could* look them up you *still* wouldn't know what they meant without first deciphering the context. And how is one supposed to know that "perlre" is the right thing to look up here? BTW, these are all rhetorical questions. And why on earth would I want to do that? No, seriously, what's the payoff? That is not a rhetorical question. What will I be able to do if I invest effort into learning and/or improving Perl that I cannot do just as easily and just as well in, say, Python? No. A limited grammar and a limited vocabulary are not the same thing. I can generate new symbols whenever I need them. I can even composulate fragulards of existentialized symboloids to imposulate novelish intentionalitizing and you even stand a fighting chance of figuring out what I mean. No, that's a myth. Why would I want to distinguish between types at all? Potato, potahto. Strings are code when you feed them to EVAL. Let me be more precise: that you can't look up unless you know the secret incantation. Yes, I know that. But what kind of brain damaged language allows numbers to be the names of variables in the first place? (That's another rhetorical question BTW.) rg [/QUOTE]