>My sad conclusion is this: > const $READONLY = 99 ; # OR use readonly '$READONLY' => 99 ; > *MYREADONLY = \'splat!' ; > print $READONLY ; # Yep, prints "splat!" and no warnings >Looks like you can't have genuinely readonly scalars in perl unless you >use ties... Why should this be an issue? Just because you can't diddle $foo doesn't mean you can't diddle the *foo typeglob. >Maybe we should have > my $READONLY : readonly = 'Initialised' ; >as Barrie Slaymaker suggested after all? Coming soon from a Larry near you: At some point, we'll enable the use of a C<constant> attribute on variable declarations: my $PI : constant = 4 * atan2(1,1); This has all the advantages of being a variable rather than a subroutine. It has all the disadvantages of not being implemented yet. --tom