>Pyrrhic victory

perhaps a tad hyperbolic? OP asked for reduction in syntax (I read it as more readable) - not even "less typing"; but the only thing I can assuredly tell you is that I tend to use this module a lot nowadays. And it is true that eliminating a paired set of curlies in exchange for some dereference syntax is worth it to me; and "overhead" (whatever that means to the reader) is generally never something I even look at. My optimizations happen on the algorithmic or complexity level; IOW I avoid nesting loops in favor of ... hashes (and references to such) :-) In any case, I should have added a YMMV.