(well, technically its a list.... but thats for another day)

Another "a-ha!" moment is just one more step away. The '=>' operator is really just a glorified comma. It will quote simple barewords on the LHS, but thats the only difference. Consider the following:

my @a = (1 => 2 => 3 => 4);
print "$_\n" for @a;
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So, the somewhat unfamiliar:

(arg1=>$blah, arg2=>$blah2)
[download]

is really just a very familiar four element list:

( 'arg1' , $blah , 'arg2' , $blah2 )
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dressed up with some syntactic sugar. (note the need to quote 'barewords' when using commas)

With this in mind, take another look at your hash assignment and named argument passing.....

-Blake