Wow thanks folks! The intent of my obviously controversial snippet of code was to save myself some work. I was taking an existing bit of transient cgi, and enhancing it so that I could save all my param()'s to a file as "var=val" pairs in a file on the server. When the user came back at some later date they could pick up where they left off.

If i was doing this from scratch I would go with the hash but i was being lazy and didn't want to modify the original code too much.

And thanks for the reference to a dissertation on perl stupidity, there must be many of us out there to require a 3 part article!

And finally I do very much appreciate this forum and your quick responses, I left the question on my way out from work and upon my return in the morning 3 responses. I couldn't pay for better support.