use warnings;
   use strict;
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Did I say three commandments? Yes, the third one is

   use diagnostics;
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when you're stumped with a message perl throws at you. In your case, with use diagnostics enabled, you'll get

    Use of implicit split to @_ is deprecated 
    at ./t line 7 (#1)
    (D deprecated) It makes a lot of work for the 
    compiler when you clobber a subroutine's argument 
    list, so it's better if you assign the results
    of a split() explicitly to an array (or list).
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So ... just assign the list returned by split() to an array, and the warning goes away.

-- saintmike

The text that use diagnostics shows is also available via perldoc perldiag. You can also run the splain utility and type in the error message for it to do the lookup for you.

Because the split call returns a list, and as you ignore the returned list, it gets stuffed into @_, the default array.

This feature is deprecated, meaning that it will disappear someday, and the interpreter is informing you so that the code can be modified to run on future versions of Perl.

In other words, do something like this:

my @array = split /\s+/;
$schds{ lc($array[0]) } = 1;
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--
Allolex

$schds{ lc( ( split( /\s+/, $_ ) )[0] ) } = 1 while <MILF>;
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With this snippet, split within the parenthesis provides a list that you can index into with a subscript (in this case, [0]. Then the first element is passed into lc, whos return value is used as the hash key for the hash named %schds.