Maybe I'm missing something here, but it seems to me that this would be a good Perl intepreter flag... i.e., that all associate array keys should be treated case-insensitively. The interpreter would implicitly run "lc" when computing the hash value for storing or retrieving a value.

The background here, as I alluded to above, is that I've got about 20,000 lines of code for a web system. Alot of my application is database-driven, and I have a module that just contains functions to retrieve rows from numerous tables.

The mechanism for returning data from the retrieve functions is a pointer to a hash table (of the returned row). The keys in the hash are case-sensitive names of the fields. So the risk here is that someone who maintains this code makes a change and typos a hash key. Unlike with using strict vars, where Perl warns you if it thinks you've made a typo in a variable name, it would be very difficult to track down a typo in a hash key.

Any other thoughts?

thanks
MFN