This is a very good point. One of the other major problems I have (besides those noted above) with reading and then re-serializing Perl data structures is that you lose all comments. When I wrote (yet another) INI parser for OpenInteract I borrowed the logic from Config::IniFiles for keeping the comments with the appropriate block when the config is written out. Works great.

(Yes, I had very good reasons for creating another INI parser. :-)

Chris
M-x auto-bs-mode