Thanks for your help merlyn! And thanks again for that wild party three years ago in Monterey. It's filled me with positive feelings about the Perl Community.

I looked at Regexp::Common, and it uses a trick similar to what I want to do, but I don't quite think it's exactly the same thing. However, reading the module's FETCH() and wrapping my head around why the module uses both TIEHASH() and new() have all given me greater insight towards my problem. Or maybe it's so extremely clever in the usual Damian fashion that to grok it would take me a lifetime.

- m.