in reply to Active State Perl 5.6.1 build 626 Trashes hashes.

And for Yet Another Reason to use strict;.. if you had included it, you would have gotten the following error..
Can't use string ("") as a HASH ref while "strict refs" in use at ./tr +y.pl line 11.
line 11 after I made it run under strict is..
x->{"FISH2"} = "FISH2";

Rich