That was definitely part of it. It was posted as a solution, and not a problem. And it's not a very good solution, for reasons that the thread revealed. Hence, my comment.

If it had been posted as "I wrote this, and I wonder if there's a way to do this better", then my comment would have been spot-on, and life would simply continue. I merely presumed that the question had somehow been forgotten.

I welcome such criticism of everything I write, be it code or text, and I think it's made me a better programmer in the long run. I would hope that budding new programmers would figure this out sooner rather than later, and not invest so much of their persona into each line of code.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
Be sure to read my standard disclaimer if this is a reply.