Correct.

I noticed this after it failed the first time and I looked closer at Athanasius's code. Gvim's context-sensitive color-coding also clued me in to what was going on.

As a follow-up, I was very successful in coding this as a nested hash - it took very little time and I was quite pleased at how easy it was. It was far less code than my previous attempt using if-statements and arrays AND no soft references!