First off fellow monk understand just what you are doing here.

Those dots you are referring to are the string concatenation operator. Each operator has a left hand side and a right hand side. I won't even start getting into precedence here since it reall y doesn't matter all that much.

my $thing = "Coca" . "Cola";
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In the above example when $thing is printed it will result in "CocaCola" being printed.

As far as the variables them selves consider this code block:

my ($left,$right)=@_;
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that will give you the same result as

my $left=$_[0];
my $right=$_[1];
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which is the same as

my $left = shift @_;
my $right = shift @_;
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but not necessarily the same as

#
# NEVER ASSUME!!!
my $right = pop @_;
my $left = pop @_;
#
# You may not get the result you are after!!
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Clear as mud?

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