Hmm... welp, the reason I was not seeing eval doing what I expected was because I was doing this: 
eval { $line };

[download]
not this: 
eval $line;

[download]

And I wholeheartedly agree... doing it this way is stupid. It was just the first thing I thought of, and got grumpy when things weren't behaving as I expected. eval EXPR != eval BLOCK. Right.

Thanks for the assists...

In reply to Re: Re: List as a string, eval'd back to the list? by markguy
in thread List as a string, eval'd back to the list? by markguy

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