The technique is called tying, for more details look at: perldoc -f tie
You need to be familar with object orientated perl, and I would consider "tie" to be an advanced technique. Drawbacks? Consider the pain to others due to unexpected behaviour. Consider the extra pain to implement it all. Benefits? You can adapt algorithms to work with data they weren't intended to work with. Or work with external data that closely matches perl's data types. E.g. DBM files can be represented as a multilevel hash - but I would still prefer to see DBI used instead. Jonathan Paton -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>
