Hello, You all have provided some great ideas on how to tackle cascading defaults. Some solutions have proposed OO possibilities, and others have used procedural methods, although I'm not sure these allow for two levels of defaults as I'm interested in. Now that I've heard some good ideas, I'd like to hear more about what's so bad about the original sort of structure proposed in the question. Here's my analysis of it:

Merits

• It's easy to understand. Because there is no OO abstraction layer, I think what the code is doing is more straightforward, and is therefore more accessible to folks to understand and extend. (Watch me contradict this below in the "Flaws" section)
• Simple calling syntax. There's no need to initialize an object before calling err and I can type simply err rather than $obj->err, potentially saving a good bit of typing.

Flaws

• Awkward interface. I don't like using having the need for a wrapper subroutine in the users module, because it appears to give them a free form interface to manipulate stuff, where with OO you have a clearer interface of what options are valid and what aren't. It could also be construed as confusing to have CGI::Err:err and MyModule::err doing similiar but slightly different things if people didn't understand what was going on.

Thanks! -mark