Mason has the flexibitly to be much more than a templating system, it can function more as a development medium, somewhat similar to PHP (I think, I know very little about PHP in reality).

Mason works well for those sticky places where form and function can't quite be separated the way we would all like in an ideal world. You can suddenly stash those code/html chunks away in components (which have inheritence), as well as set up some default behaviours for all of your components.

As for supporting Perl functionality, I've built large scale database applications using Mason, that included things such as anonymous subroutines in config files, debug modules that walked the symbol table and replaced subroutines matching a pattern with stubs, and other perlish type things. I'd have to say I haven't encountered a situation yet that we couldn't get through.

All those things being said, if you just want to get your web folks access to some variables, you'd probably be better off sticking to one of the other great templating systems around, because Mason really is a lot more (think hitting flies with a sledge hammer)

cephas