;-) I never said that "slow and buggy" came from PBP...I referenced the output of perlcritic from whence it came - what did come from PBP (and yes this is probably old advice) "use constants but don't use constant" - in any event you have shone some light on why Readonly and ReadonlyX clash - thank you so much for your responses! (and yes I wish corporate InfoSec folks had some common sense and realized that not everything spewed out by some analyzer should be taken as gospel)