well, my problem was that I did look up what $; did and as a result I thought you were using some deep deep magic in your sprintf that I had never seen. actually you were using silly magic (in the form of feeding sprintf a format in a variable) that I had never seen before. Very good, then. As you were. =)
"A man's maturity -- consists in having found again the
seriousness one had as a child, at play." --Nietzsche