Thanks for the input, yes this code is going on about 15 years old at the least... I have a question about the way the arguments are being passed, it looks a lot like hash notation found in perl so I'm confused about how the arguments get interpreted on the subroutine side. Does this implementation require a change in the subroutine itself or will it still be able to read the same arguments that are passed in, meaning that this is only a change to the way the subroutine is called?