Hrmmm... well the engineer actually put everything in a package, but for some reason has no idea about returning hashes or *something*...

Actually what scares me mostly about this guy is that he claims he writes faster code in Perl than in C. So either he is a Perl god (which I think I can rule out already) or he is an even worse programmer in C than in Perl.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestions... I'll just make sure to change my variables over to 'my' and protect myself as best I can.

Maybe I'll just continue to bug my boss to let me take over this guy's project anyway. Any time I ask him to do something it doesn't get done until it's convenient for *him*... and then it's all 'huzzah I've implemented this amazing feature that I *just* realized our group needed' :P