Greetings, Monks. I've been cobbling away at creating a Perl based CMS, for a few years now. It's turned out quite nice, and is very featurefull -- including a Forum.

To the point;
As I indicated, it's been built over several years, and it shows. So I'm hoping to clean things up enough to release it into the wild.

I'm currently looking at the following message from perl:

defined(%hash) is deprecated at
[download]

This, as many/most of you already know, was depreciated around v.5.10. The actual code block(s) that trigger the message are:

...
    if(($position eq 'l' || $position eq 'r') && defined %leftright) {
      %tags = (%tags,%leftright);
    } elsif(($position eq 't' || $position eq 'b') && defined %topbott
+om) {
      %tags = (%tags,%topbottom);
    }
...
[download]

While Perl, itself, suggest simply removing defined, and I suppose I have little reason to doubt the brilliance of Perl -- hell, it's smarter than I am. But my investigations indicate that others looking to deal with this same situation, do so in a myriad of different ways. So I thought it prudent to get some feedback from those here, I've come to trust. :)

In other words; How would you deal with it?

Thanks, for all your time, and consideration.

--Chris