note LanX I care less about the name than the functionality, could be also "count" or whatever suits. <P> I suppose "elems" is already known from ruby or perl6? So why not.¹<P> But² [tobyink]s and [Moritz|your] suggestion w/o prototypes is considerably slower on large arrays.<P> <c> DB<106> use Time::HiRes qw(time) DB<107> sub elems { scalar @_ } DB<108> @a=(1..1e6);0 DB<109> $t=time; $count = scalar @a; print time-$t 7.10487365722656e-05 DB<110> $t=time; $count = elems @a; print time-$t 0.0554749965667725 </c><P> Perl 5.10! <!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only --> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-708738"> <p>Cheers Rolf </div></div><P> ¹) Well the plural in "elems" somehow indicates a list to be returned. <P> ²) [id://1007795|as already said] 1007787 1007798