note moritz <p><c>size</c> is a terrible name, because it doesn't imply any unit. It could stand for string length in characters, string length in bytes, used memory, number of allocated elements in a container, number of actual elements in a container or any other size you can think of.</p> <p>It makes sense to you now because it's not too bad in the mental context you are in, but from the outside it's not good. <p>Anyway, if you don't fiddle with prototypes at all, the argument list of a subroutine is automatically in list context, so you can just write <code> sub elems { scalar @_ } </code> <p>and don't need a new keyword at all. <!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only --> <div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-616540"> [http://perl6.org/|Perl 6 - the future is here, just unevenly distributed] </div></div> 1007787 1007787