Class::Tangram is a common base class originally intended for use with Tangram objects, that gives you free constructors, access methods, update methods, and a destructor that should help in breaking circular references for you. Type checking is achieved by parsing the Tangram schema for the object, which is contained within the object class in an exported variable $schema. WWW: http://search.cpan.org/search?dist=Class-Tangram -- Sergey Skvortsov skv@FreeBSD.org