[Mark M] >Oh, sure. Contextual distinction. In Perl, the '#' character begins a >comment, but '$#foo', iirc, is an assignable variable meaning the >highest subscript value in the array @foo. I think in this case #, is a special character, that only has meaning in the comment case and the array indexing. I suspect that it's something that Larry put in for convienence, but I'm unsure how the interpreter/compiler handles it. (since you can accomplish the same thing with size(@array) -1 ). Then again, that seems like a bit of a kludge, and Larry doesn't generally kludge stuff. Regardless, in both cases it is not an operator but more of a variable. (In the comment case it isn't really a variable, but it's also not an operator.) Ok, so I broke out my _Bat_ book, and if you'll excuse some sweeping, and perhaps wrong, generalizations I'll explain why I think sendmail is the conterexample. Brief background: Sendmail rules are broken into 3 parts, only 2 of which are of real interest to us: Left Hand Side (LHS) [tab] Right Hand Side (RHS) [tab] Comment The LHS is used as a pattern match with the workspace to determine if a rule is invoked. The RHS rewrites the workspace. The sytax for the RHS is: Operator rule Discussion: Consider the rule matching an address where the workspace as 0 remaining tokes and you want to rewrite it once and return (don't continue within the rule) and you want to do it the rewrite on a lookup from the database. Here is an example of how this could be done: R$@ $@$(U $2 $@$1 $:$2.XXX $) In this case $@ is the matching string (I think operator would be incorrect here), the rewrite operator and finally the substitution determinator (again a string). This strikes me as an example of when a single 'symbol' is being used in multiple contexts, and thus is a counter-example. -Jot P.S: No warranty is made, expressed or implied about the validity of this in any sendmail configuration. It takes me a not inconsiderable amount of time, immersing myself in a particular problem, to really grok sendmail configurations. I've done it before, but not unlike hitting yourself in the testicles, it's not much fun. :)