I only added the eval bit as I got tired of having to manually convert $username = $params{'username'}; each time I wanted to display the username variable (again my own code which replaces tagged fields with variables and I was unable to get it to handle hash or list values but it was happy with scalars).

$params{'name'} = "Slim Shady";
print "My name is $params{'name'}\n";
print "My name is $params{name}\n";
print "My name is $params{\"name\"}\n";
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{nods in agreement} I do use my $params{'things'} in strings and concat to strings 'bit '.$params{'bot'} however:

My templating function does this nattly little conversion of a field name into its value in a string:

 $fld =~ s/\$(\w+)/${$1}/g; # convert variable into its value..
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Which failed the first time I tried including a $params{'thing'} so I gave up and just used $scalars ever since :-)

I should re-investigate.. sounds like a good idea!

 ___
/\__\ "What is the world coming to?"
\/__/ www.wolispace.com
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Ah but your templating system is using global variables for the substitution, which is why it doesn't work with a hash. If you see "$(things)" you try and replace it with the contents of $things. And that's using symbolic references, which is a bad idea. See these 3 posts by dominus for an explanation why symbolic references are a very bad idea, in general. The moral of it is that it's very easy for them to clash with vital variables for your program. It's like driving a car with your passengers seated on your engine.

Why don't you build your templating system around a hash? Store every value you ever want to use in one hash, let's call it %var, and do the substitution like this:

 $fld =~ s/\$(\w+)/$var{$1}/g;
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Dead easy. You can simply use %params as your hash, or copy the desired values to %var first:

 %var = (%params, foo => 'this is a new or changed field', bar => 'and
+ another', greet => 'Hello');
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If your template contains "$(greet)" it'll get replaced by "Hello".