pemungkah,

Thanks for your thoughts. I needed to do a mind transformation to think in terms of references; and, once I did that it was much more clear. My mind tends to think in terms of "static typed variables" if that is a valid way to put it. By that I mean that the variable name "dumm" is always what you initially declare it as.

In addition I don't use Perl very much and remembering all the little syntax variations requires me to thumb through O'Reily's Programming Perl; all 1,000 plus pages. One that always bites me is using ";" in for statements to separate expressions rather than ",".

I agree on the "This is not the world's best clearest code." comment. Before I found this subroutine I was going to write my own. It was written by a mathematics professor at the Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy about seven years ago; it worked and being a follow the path of least resistance kind of person I used it.

With regard to running some test data in a debugger I did that, sort of. However, rather than a debugger I used a number of print statements formatted in a way that put everything on one page of paper so I could pick up a pencil and trace what was happening.

Again thanks for your comments. I know it took some effort to respond in the detail manner you did. I follow and provide help on the "MozillaZine" forum and understand the effort.

Cheers