Umm, what is it you think that the package statement does in this code?

Because I'm hard pressed to think of anything that it might affect in the code you have posted. The vars are all lexical. So they arent modified at all by the package declaration.

I know that. I'm not that much of a Perl newbie :)

The exact problem I'm trying to solve is the same thing Test::Aggregate does: run arbitrary bits of code and ensure that we don't have namespace pollution. If one chunk of code defines a package variable or creates a subroutine in its namespace, I don't want that clashing with other chunks of code. Hence, the package declaration.