There’s probably a good reason why eval is only one letter away from evil But used wisely it can be very powerful.

However be wary of the differences between string & block evals.

If you can do it in an eval block then do so because this catches compile time errors and is faster because doesn’t need recompiling each time its run unlike a string eval.

Of course in your first example you can do it without eval by just passing a subroutine coderef…..

sub loadme {
  my ($name, $code) = @_;
  no strict 'refs';
  *$name = $code;
}

loadme("noway", sub { print "yadda yadda yadda\n" } );
noway();

For your other examples and what your really after in previous blog you may find something useful on CPAN. Have a look at Parse::RecDescent.

/I3az/

Your description of Typeglobs is correct. Simon Cozens in his book “Advanced Perl Programming” has a very good section on it. His code below helps explain typeglobs succinctly…..

*a = \"Hello";
*a = [ 1, 2, 3 ];
*a = { red => 'rouge', blue => 'bleu' };

print $a;          # Hello
print $a[1];       # 2
print $a{'red'};   # rouge

Simon also goes to show how you can alias variables together using typeglobs….

@b = (1,2,3,4);
*a = \@b;
push @b, 5;
print @a;  # 12345

# however
$a = "Bye";
$b = "Hello there!";
print $a;   # Bye

You need to understand about the Symbol Table to explain why first bit works and second bit doesn’t in the above example. Simon’s book or “Mastering Perl” by brian d foy are both excellent resources on this. brian’s book (or versions of) are available online at his website. Here’s the chapter on symbol tables and typeglobs

/I3az/

PS. My perl code always does strange things! Your right to always treat it with due caution and very wise to use/learn/adapt it a snippet at a time.