At some point in their life, every programmer decides that, for the problem at hand, the best solution is to create a set of functions and pass their names as variables. It's not.
First, its a security hazard, as users' input should never be used to execute code in your programs. Second, since code doesn't write itself, the functions themselves have to be written and named, so the actual "variable named after function/function named after variable" scheme isn't much different than foo() if (/foo/).
This pseudo-"functional programming" is better written as a hash with the variable name as key and a function ref as value, similar (but not limited) to this example:

use strict;
use warnings;

my %hash = (
    foo => sub {return "foo\n"},
    bar => sub {return "bar\n"},
);

print &{$hash{'foo'}};
[download]

Also, with single quotes, 'foo\n' prints foo\n rather than "foo" and a newline.

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