You could probably, with a bit of work, use a hash and a list of values. Here's some relatively untested, unbeautiful stuff that makes me more likely to stick with declaring the variables in advance: 
my %columns;

# stuff here

$sth->bind_columns(
    map { \${ $columns{$_} } @{ $sth->{NAME_lc} }
)  || die("unable to bind columns: ", $sth->errstr);

# dereference somehow, may not be correct

while($sth->fetch) {
    print "<tr><td>$name</td><td>$columns{price}</td></tr>\n";
    print "<tr><td colspan=\"2\">$columns{description}</td></tr>\n";
}

[download]
Update: Yeah, there's really no big benefit to doing it this way. :)

In reply to Re: References of Eternal Peril by chromatic
in thread References of Eternal Peril by mwp

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