> p.s. Is there a reason why not to have a "dec" function
> to be the reciprocal of "hex"? Why does ProgrammingPerl
> use sprintf to convert hex->dec instead of a function which
> seems cleaner?

'Dec' is the default - it's what most of us are used to. Hex and oct are not that way that people learned to count, so having some convienence functions make sense. I think that sprintf is pretty clean myself :) but to each their own. If it really bothers you, why not just create your own "dec" function (subroutine)?