merlyn was responding to a request for one variable to have the name of another. This is a bad idea for reasons that Dominus explained at length here. Of course accepting and processing arbitrary keys in a safe manner (eg in a hash) is safe. The only possible confusion then will be that (like globals) the same name will get used twice in two places and the two will get confused for each other. Of course then you just have multiple keys which between them are a unique identifier. One for the data elment in the form, one for the form.