thanks for your answer. I beg to differ on the merits of OO even in a lowly client. I prefer to have a nested bunch of OO objects which know how to print themselves rather than printing a hash which can be different given different input toggles. Or they know how to return their part of a bigger query. Anyway, in prototyping I worked with the json/perlhash and know that that will not fly in the long run re:maintenance and brain rot.

On the particular error, there is a declaration: scalar Ratio but that does not seem to be picked up. I have replaced Ratio with a Float but then other errors occured as there are quite a few typedefs like Ratio.