thanks for the great suggestions. unfortunately, you've brought on *more* questions! :-)

I think the idea of using a tied hash is very elegant; the problem is that, though I've read the manpage you've linked to, and also the Tied Variables chapter in my Camel-3rdEd book, my brain is in a total fog. Perhaps my problem is that I still don't really understand the object-oriented universe (no matter how hard I've tried!), and all of the examples in the manpage/book use OO syntax (which I've avoided.)

Is it possible to implement the tied variable in my module without getting into the OO realm, or am I missing the point? (the point being that tied variables are fundamentally part of OO perl syntax.)

Thanks again for the help; anything I can do to make this code better, I'm open to. Just not sure that my little brains is up for the task.