Uh, no. Don't do this. You have duplicated the code for parsing $a and $b. Once you've done that, you run into maintenance headaches or worse, you could be treating them asymetrically, and on older versions of Perl this could actually dump core.

PLEASE DON'T copy this style at all. There have been other much better postings in this thread.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker