I think tlm is right, I should be using HOH here, so I will be doing a bit of code rewrite.

One disadvantage of HOH that occurs to me right away though, is if I mistype a key when setting a value in the hash, I don't get any type of error message. I often have autovivification errors that arise in this kind of way.

Is there any way to program defensively against this kind of error? One thing that occurs to me is I could just use the "functions as constants" thing that ikegami mentions earlier. Anyone else have other defense programming suggestions for dealing with this and autovivification with HOH?