note dragonchild Bravo! ++. <p>This sounds very much like a call to think through one's designs first. (You do design, right?) Laying out the branches on paper is a very good way of doing this. <p>Of course, there are some gotchas. For example, the place I'm at right now has a lot of legacy code that uses the form <code> sub foo { my $self = shift; if (ref $self) { # Do stuff return $some_useful_value; } else { # Complain return undef; } } </code> This is vs. the (to me) more intuitive <code> sub foo { my $self = shift; unless (ref $self) { # Complain return undef } # Do stuff return $some_useful_value } </code> *blinks* I guess I just proved your point, huh? :-) <p>------<br><i>We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.</i><p>Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means <i>Worry only about what you need to implement.</i> 136097 136097