i won't argue with the anonymous monk, since any syntax errors were irrelevant to the my question.

Actually, our good friend Anonymous Monk perfectly proved the point I was trying to make. While there were indeed syntax errors in your sample code, that's easy to fix. The worse problem in your code was the semantic error. Namely, '+1d' is not a valid date for a cookie expiration. Support for that is built into the module, such that any code that feeds '+1d' into the cookie function gets the "fix" (or in this case, "feature" would probably be more accurate), and a valid date is put in its place. Now, you could probably code up your own subroutine to convert a string like '+1d' into a valid datestamp, but that code could have other bugs. And all your earlier simplicity is thrown out the window. This is exactly what we're trying to avoid with code re-use.

thank you ... for your comments and the time spent in responding

And thank you for asking an interesting question. Even though this discussion goes on again and again, it's still useful to bring up every now and then. Perhaps some Monks get tired of it, but, personally, I enjoy talking about things like this. Even more when it might benefit a newbie, recently embarked on his long and adventerous journey that is learning to program in Perl. :-)