I sympathize, but mentioned 7 months ago in Re: Complex dispatch table that I had met with extreme problems using the standalone Switch module so don't use it. It seems great, but people said it was my fault for using something which was not meant to be of production quality. It seemed to trigger instabilities which showed up only when parsing the program sometimes, for example behavior changed with whitespace or by moving lines around in the program. I have not used Switch for case statements since then and usually use a hash for dispatch tables, so you have been warned. If you are using something built into perl itself now which I have missed then perhaps it is safe..