Thanks Zaxo. As I mentioned in my reply to runrig, I'm not getting the dispatch tables immediately, but your example helps and I'll go ahead and try it, without understanding it completely, and maybe it will become clearer as I go. Not very orthodox, but I'm probably not the first coder to write something I don't fully understand, and have it work :-)

Update:
Googled, found lots of examples, but none as clear as in above replies. So, started with code posted here, and after some minor explosions, got it. Here's a distilled sample that puts it all together. Thanks all!

#CGI stuff and parsing form here ...

my $funct = param('funct'); #button user clicks

my %action = (
   'Save News' => \&savenews,
   'Add Book' => \&addbook,
);

( $action{$funct} || \&default )->();

sub savenews {
   print "save news\n";
}
sub addbook {
   print "add book\n";
}
sub default {
   print "not a choice\n";
}
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