I've had similar experiences quite a while ago, just after having discovered Perl. Before then I'd mainly been playing around with C, so discovering there was a way to emulate Switch made me quite a happy camper. Initially it all worked fine, and then things just started going funky. Quite dazzled, I finally ended up replacing the entire Switch by a huge(and i do mean huge, a couple hundred possibilities) if-elsif-elsif-else contraption which worked exactly the way I wanted it to. Never really looked back after that. If something doesn't work exactly the way it is supposed to work, especially when there's a perfectly good alternative, why take the risk?

To stray from the topic for a moment, I can't think of a reason why it would be impossible to implement a form of switch in pure Perl though. It'd likely be a lot slower than if-elseif-else, but it'd make for a nice intellectual challenge ;-)

Obviously someone already rose to the challenge, as I could have predicted had I turned my brain up a notch for just a second there. Seems that someone also happened to post just before I did...