Greetings Monks!

This question is probably more trouble than it's worth, but it's been bugging me, so here goes:

I can create constants like so: 

use constant { FOO => 1, BAR => 2 };

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but if I want a way to convert the number back into a string, I need to do something that defines the same relationships again, like 
my @num_to_name = qw(FOO BAR);

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which allows me to do things like: 
my $thing = FOO;
print "Thing = ".$num_to_name[$thing]."\n";

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My problem is, I hate that I have to maintain my constant declarations and my @num_to_name list separately. If I was doing this with a large number of constants, I'd screw it up for sure.

I actually made a thing that sort of does what I want, though It's cludge-tastic and probably all wrong and unnecessarily stupid:

my @num_to_name;
BEGIN {
    @num_to_name = qw(FOO BAR);
    for my $number ( 0 .. $#things) {
        *blah = eval "*My::Package::".$things[$number];
        *blah = sub { $number };
    }
}

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With that monster, $num_to_name[FOO] eq 'FOO' no matter what. It loses the inlining of use constant, which is part of what's lame about it.

Is there a way to do this that sucks less?

Thank you for your indulgence

--Pileofrogs

In reply to Crazy constant question... by pileofrogs

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