All,

Thanks for all your responses. I should have mentioned earlier that the complete codes has many more conditions than the snippet I provided.
That said, the suggestions to use dispatch table seems reasonable to me...

I tend to think that the switch "given" in 5.10 (5.9.4) as suggested by Kyle is clearer anyhow. But it'll take a while before my employer upgrade the perl version in production :-)

Thanks again!
   Blooky