It's a good point. Damn Canadians and their logic ;-) I wasn't really trying to validate against type so much as by number, and having the first line of my sub definition be a hint as to its usage. I have the attention span of a hummingbird on crack, and I forget what my subs do and how to call them between uses in the same coding session. I also really like having sane variable names in my functions, and @_[1] is not, in my opinion, sane. Useful, but not sane.