Aha! Thanks very much. It wasn't obvious to me that this was a pseudo-hash lookup, but now that you point it out its quite clear. And from this example alone its a Good Thing that they are going to go away. Any array containing a hash as the 0 element gets magically treated as a pseudo hash. The fog clears....

At the very least the pseudo-hash code should insist that the hash is composed of ONLY integer values, and certianly should NOT silently numerify the array ref. It should throw a fatal error there IMO. Anyway, we all know thats not going to happen, as they well be disappearing soon enough, but what an oversight.

*sigh* and thanks. Good eye.