Edward Peschko writes: : Anyways, my one curiosity that sticks out would be: why \Q as being a way to : disambiguate? You could do the same thing with: : : print "$foo\[1]\n" : vs : print "$foo[1]\n"; Not good enough. Consider what this might means: m/$foo\[a-z]\n/ Is it matching a literal [ or starting a character class? What people need to realize is that the ugliness of \Q is a feature. It's designed to stop you in your visual tracks. But I really don't mind nested structures--the problem with ${foo[bar]} was precisely that it *wasn't* nested right. So the people who still want to use nesting can always use expression interpolation: print "$( $foo )[1]\n" which I think can reasonably be made to stop parsing at the right paren. (Though a case could be made for continuing there too... However, I expect that anything you could do outside the parens you could also do inside, so there's no reason not to stop parsing there.) Larry