Thanks for the response, and just for the record: I'm not *that* concerned about memory. I was just reviewing some code I'd written previously looking for refactoring opportunities, redundant redundancies, unnecessary verbosity, and general housekeeping opportunities... and I found myself wondering if there would be any upside (or downside) to combining those two lines into one.

I tend to be a stickler for testing and reporting on errors, and BrowserUk has convinced me that error-reporting alone is a good reason to keep those lines separate.

Again, thanks!

        $perlmonks{seattlejohn} = 'John Clyman';