Wow thanks for the reply okol (and for the benefit of the doubt!) I really learned a lot from all the replies, but yours is nice and simple and probably about as fast as possible.

I tried just a slight variation and I think it's going to work nicely. 
use strict;
use warnings;
my %description = ( a => 'a vowel',
                    b => 'a consonant',
                    default => 'not in the alphabet' );

for my $char (qw/a b c/) {
   my $d = $description{$char} || $description{default};
   print("$char is $d\n");
}

[download]
I still can't quite get my head around the way that the logical or works. I would think that it would only return 1 or 0, but evidently here it's returning the whole string back again.

Anyway, thanks for all the help everybody. I did kinda post problem Y without getting into the specifics of problem X, but that was only because I thought X would bore everybody to tears!

In reply to Re^2: Default Hash Key by tford
in thread Default Hash Key by tford

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