graff and tachyon:

Thanks for the demonstrations. As I mentioned in the review, I'm not entirely comfortable manipulating hashes yet-- and as graff points out succinctly, a small slip can give odd results that are hard to find. (This, BTW, is why I'm spending time at perlmonks-- I'm at the point where I know enough Perl to *really* screw stuff up if I don't understand what I'm doing-- I need to read other people's code as much as I can.)

And that's another reason why I thought the review was appropriate-- the module author points to his inspiration (much like your code) in the Perl Cookbook, and also to other modules that do similar things.

This is a great way to learn, while also not making silly mistakes in production code. Does it objectify something simple? Sure-- but it gives me a lot more confidence that my script is working correctly, and also points me to a starting place for when I have to do something more complex later.