Does this journey tell you anything about the advisability of mixing presentation and code in this fashion? This sort of popping back and forth between presentation and code makes for maintenance headaches. It's also a great temptation with Template Toolkit. For something simple like populating a list with HTML::Template you can:

use strict;
use warnings;
use HTML::Template;

my @items = map {{item => $_}} qw(first second third fourth);
my $template = HTML::Template->new(filehandle => *DATA);

$template->param(items => \@items);
print $template->output();

__DATA__
    <TMPL_IF name="items">
    <ul><TMPL_LOOP name="items">
       <li><TMPL_VAR name="item"></li></TMPL_LOOP>
    </ul></TMPL_IF>
[download]

Prints:

    
    <ul>
       <li>first</li>
       <li>second</li>
       <li>third</li>
       <li>fourth</li>
    </ul>
[download]

and renders as:

• first
• second
• third
• fourth