Thank you all for your patient replies, which I greatly appreciate and have helped me to focus. I'm realizing that I did a lot of vague handwaving and it's good that I got any answers at all.

To get back to what I'm dealing with, I'll try to approach it from the right way around this time.

What I have is a simulation of a real system. I'm trying to create a framework which incorporates the existing binaries and trappings that make this work. This system has a lot of parameters, which are represented in the tied hash. My goal is to explore a parameter space in a sensible way, like holding all parameters fixed except one, changing that one, getting a result, and repeating until I've gone through all the values of all the parameters I'm interested in. Some parameters are correlated, and so those must be changed together.

So the "things" I'm dealing with are really parameters, and they have various trappings... So drawing from what others have said, I think creating a class representing a single parameter of interest is a reasonable thing...

Now that I've thought this out through my keyboard, I'm going to get to work on coding this bad boy. Thanks again for all your help. Feel free to stop me if I'm wrong.

~MB