merlyn,
This is very cool! I did run into one small quirk in the key/value pair example - it doesn't stop (I think because the last drops out of the for, not the loop block). I got it to work as:

LOOP: { defined($_ = <STDIN>) or last LOOP for my($key,$value);
        chomp($key,$value);
        $hash{$key} = $value;
        redo;
      }
[download]

I guess the chomp really isn't necessary, but I wanted to ditch the newlines. Thanks!

- robsv