Thanks for taking time to comment,
ZZamboni. I really should have phrased my
"p.s." something like :
p.s. I played a bit with a module that facilitates Hash insertion order retrieval, but couldn't make it work. Wish I could remember the module - stumbled across it somewhere in O'Reilly Perl CD Bookshelf.
It's as likely or more that I had bad syntax than a down-level Perl incompatibility. Is nothing important to me at the moment. By the time I expect to pick it back up, hope to be on Debian 2.2 with a newer $^X$]