note dchetlin I try to hide it, but my first love was Dylan and I'm a functional programmer at heart. It often frustrates me that I can't use the return values of [chomp], [s], [pop], etc. to chain operations/functions. <p>Had I the capability to turn back the clock and influence Larry in his language decisions, I would vote for the operators like the above to return the value that they now modify in place, and for each to have a bang complement (e.g. <code>chomp!</code>) that works the way the current ones do. Ruby does this to some extent. <p>tchrist has been known to say similar things, based on his observations of what people new to the language expect. See, for example, [http://www.mail-archive.com/perl6-all@perl.org/msg04438.html|this perl6 post]. I can't see a change like this really happening -- it would affect too many scripts. <p>-dlc 50578 50578