One thing I left out. The reason Dumper is printing out the blessed qr// as \undef is becuase it sees it as a reference to a scalar (which apparently it is, but isnt really (whee perl is fun! :-)) and tries to follow it using $$var. But $$var seems to evaluate to undef in this situation (apparently another hole in the way the regex type is handled) so Dumper ends up rendering it as a reference to a var. It is precisely this reason that I want to know how to identify these beasties. My dumper should handle this situation properly.

$
$\=$/;
my $var=bless qr/[A-Z]o[A-Z]/,'foo';
print $var;
print ref $var;
print defined $$var ? $$var : 'undef';
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Yves / DeMerphq
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Writing a good benchmark isnt as easy as it might look.