I was under the impression that "use strict" would disallow me from using package level variables

The use of strict merely discourages the use of package variables. As long as a variable exists within the package's symbol table you're free to use it without it being fully qualifying.

If you had a hash as a data member of the blessed object (which itself was a hash) then you would use it like so

# assign to hash
$self->{hash}->{foo} = 'bar';

# get keys from hash
keys %{$self->{hash}};

# tie hash
tie %{$self->{hash}}, "AnyDBM_File", "data", O_RDWR, 0644;
[download]

If you're a little confused about how how classes and objects work I'd recommend reading Tom Christiansen's oo tutorial and perhaps also read up on references in perl.
HTH

_________
broquaint

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