note Burak <blockquote> <i>"I'm using it in production scripts now ..."</i> </blockquote> Well. That's a hack and a bad idea to use in some *real* code. I suggest adding a long comment before it to explain what the heck it does. But anyway I still think that this code is nasty <p> And here is another nasty one (multi dimensional hash emulation): <code> C:\>perl -wle "use strict; my %h; $h{'foo','bar', 'baz'} = 'dumb'; print $h{qw/foo bar baz/}" dumb C:\>perl -V:version version='5.10.0'; C:\> </code> achaic but works and hey, who needs references :p 204874 204874