Re: regular expression and grep function questions

[hippo]

Consider the general form:

some_sub($foo, @bar, $baz);

How would perl know when @bar ends and $baz begins? Actually, it cannot. So, one can suppose that the argument list is equivalent to these scalars:

$foo, $bar[0], $bar[1], $bar[2], ..., $bar[n], $baz

So, there is no great significance to your $number other than it is appended to the end of the argument list.