note chromatic There's a thread on p5p that has to do with <a href="http://www.perl.com/pub/2000/12/p5pdigest/THISWEEK-20001217.html">Precedence</a>. Just like in C, the order of evaluation is not strictly determined. <p> The original thread starts <a href="http://www.xray.mpe.mpg.de/mailing-lists/perl5-porters/2000-12/msg00443.html">here</a>, where our own [japhy] says "It hurts when I stick a fork in my eye!" <p> Seriously, it's a combination of recursion and modifying a global (@_). If you copy the arguments into a lexical array in li(), you'll get better results. <p> <strong>Update:</strong> [chromatic] resolves to be more specific about his terminology. 66880 66880