doh! i feel really silly. of course, the variables would be in the namespace of the caller.

i had tried various combinations of & and $ on the sort routine. little did i realize that NO symbols are needed!

yes, i need to use a prototyped sort sub as many other packages will call this.

BTW, i also changed the hash access to a method

    my $ftA = $_[0]->fet();
    my $ftB = $_[1]->fet();
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this looks cleaner too!

thanks again...

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