I guess this isn't really a sensible suggestion unless you want to do some *really* mad stuff, but I'm slightly surprised that more people don't use globjects - where they bless the entire glob, rather than just a hash or array.

Then you can use, for example, the hash to store your public variables, the array to store your private ones, the scalar to keep a count of something, etc ...

This is what Data::Locations does, but it takes it to mad extremes: it's also a self-tied filehandle which rolls its own reference counting for garbage collection.

Removing the comments from this and getting potential employees to code review it at interview is a good way of seeing what someone's advanced level perl is like.

Tony