My humblest apologies, AnomalousMonk.

I didn't read Tux's post carefully enough, and because it appeared under your post, I wrongly thought Tux was talking to you.  But looking now at the indentation of Tux's post, it looks as if he was responding to my original post.  I wasn't meaning to claim your code wouldn't work with 'strict', but I was trying to allow for that possibility, if what I thought Tux was saying, was correct.

Sorry.