There must be a Perlish way to do this. . . I have a situation where I want to load some text strings from a file for later printing, but the variables that are going to be inserted into the strings are not known until much later in the program. So what I think I want is to find a way to cause the string to re-interpolate the scalars. Here's some sample code: 
$message = "Hello $name\n";
#. . . other code that does unrelated stuff . . .
$name = "Larry Wall";
print $message;

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What I'd like is for the message to print as "Hello Larry Wall", but what I get is "Hello". Eval doesn't seem to work the way I would expect it to. (So I must be expecting incorrectly, too!) I've tried this: 
$message = "Hello $name\n";
#. . . other code that does unrelated stuff . . .
$name = "Larry Wall";
print eval $message;

[download]
I still just get "Hello" back. And then I got to thinking that maybe I got just the "Hello" because $name was already substituted, and by this time only "Hello" exists in the string (without the $name). So, I tried to declare $message with single quotes thusly: 
$message = 'Hello $name\n';
#. . . other code that does unrelated stuff . . .
$name = "Larry Wall";
print eval $message;

[download]
And that didn't work either. I got nuthin.
I tried lots of other stuff that I'm embarassed to admit, and so I won't.
I'm running under the assumption that it is STILL true that "Perl makes easy things easy and hard things possible." I've a feeling that this comes under the first category, rather than the last. But either way, there must be a solution.
So how do I get Perl to re-interpolate the $message string when I need it to?
Thanks much, in advance.
--Mark

In reply to Postdefining scalars by markwild

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