OK, I am getting enough of what you are telling me to understand your point.

I know some of the basics of OO, and I know how to use Perl as a replacement for awk. I jumped straight into using Object::InsideOut without ever writing up my own simple Perl classes, so I'm ignorant of Perl OO implementation basics. Yesterday on the drive home I figured out that is why some of my questions come from left field and why this advice is more opaque to me than I'd like.

What still mystifies me about your code is the use of the ... operator. This is just a range operator right? I've read every paragraph of perlop that contains the '...' string, but I still don't understand you use of that operator.

Thanks.