Monks ~

I'm writing a script with CGI and HTML::Template. This code:

$template->param( STYLE_SHEET       => "$STYLE_SHEET",
                  SCRIPT_LOCATION   => "$SCRIPT_LOCATION",
                  MEMBER_NAME       => $q->param('realname')
                 );
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Produces an error ("You gave me an odd number of parameters to param()!") if $q->param('realname') isn't defined. Set $q->param('realname') to 0 (or anything else) and everything's fine.

First question
This code:

$template->param( MEMBER_NAME       => $q->param('realname')
                 );
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Produces no errors with identical input. Why? As long as MEMBER_NAME is the only parameter, it seems not to matter if $q->param('realname') defined or not. It's only when there are other parameters that I get the error. The error itself makes a sort of sense, but this seems inconsistent.

Second question
One solution to this is to explicitly set every parameter to 0 if it's not defined. This is possible, but inelegant, and a headache. I like that Perl assumes false if something's undefined. Am I missing something?

Third question
This code is kind of ugly, especially compared with assigning to a hash slice (@row is a row returned from a database):

if (@row) {
    $q-param( mid        => $row[0],
              name       => $row[1],
              realname   => $row[2],
              email      => $row[3]
             );
}
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And if, as in question 2 above, I set every param to 0 if it was undefined, I'd have to add something like this:

} else {
    $q-param( mid        => 0,
              name       => 0,
              realname   => 0,
              email      => 0
             );
}
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Surely there's a better way?

TIA
--
man with no legs, inc.