Hi Ovid,
Thanks for the link to PadWalker.
I can think of one good use myself. I have a module that represents account configuration information. (Accounts don't have access to them.). It's stored in a tied hash but will evaluate scalars with a s///e when they are fetched.

This lets me say 'signup.confirm' => "Thank you $name, we will notify you shortly." in the general config.
This way, I can easily customize our programs for clients. The tie module has an alias function so I can say call
hash_alias( qw ($name) );. Which when the value is retrieved, it will print the correct $name.
Currently, this means $name has to be a package variable for this to work.

With Padwalker, I can get around this. (We are only reading their values from here, never ever setting.) I suppose if I wanted to be extremely careful, I could assign the peek_my to a read only %hash with weakened references.

-Lee

"To be civilized is to deny one's nature."