But I think I will put that Variables.pm file to practice shortly

right but beware that there may be dragons if you modify those variables in subscripts. There may be cases (which I am not aware of, I am not a Perl expert) where changing a package variable will not be reflected to other users of said package (e.g. one of your various subscripts). For read-write variables it's not a good way and I will not use myself.

some here seem bent on forcing me into their mold

Oh come on! (respectfully said). From my experience this is hardly the case with PM (compare to Stack overflow by posting this exact question there -- even your super-ground -- good story btw -- will not protect you from the flaming lightnings they will throw at you). Perl is a fertile ground for TIMTOWTDI and Perl culture preaches it. Perl allows you to do a lot of things, even shooting your foot, some people, understandably frown on extremely un-productive or buggy solutions which can lead to future problems (e.g. maintainability). If I may say so (and I don't wish to start a conversation about this side-issue): saying that your case is special because you are the only maintainer, is not an argument to the good points presented here (about general programming practices at least). You are offered good solutions which require that you change some of your programming habits, "change gear", "grow up" as a user of a programming language. Case-in-point is OO (actually the free style of Perl OO). It can reduce code-lines (which you are interested) tremendously by re-using code, it can encapsulate data and transformations which will make your code more maintainable, easier to handle. It does not require super-human abilities but it requires to program along certain "molds". And btw the -> is used just as you will be using it in a hashref (which essentially is what an OO object is, a mere hashtable with data AND subs as values). Try posting a question about OO and see what happens.

bw, bliako