in reply to formbox.pl

Whew! Where to begin? It is a kinda neat idea -- specify the layout of of the GUI on the command line; or, really nice: save it in a simple text file. Very appealing. I took out the one bad line that caused the syntax error, and it worked. But as for the implementation...

I won't spend the time to try to prove this, but I suspect the same functionality could be achieved with about half as much code, or more likely, a third.

update: Forgot to mention -- Please fix your indenting style. Try this command-line, putting the file name of your script as indicated:

perl -MO=Deparse your_script.pl
Doesn't that seem easier to read than what you posted? It does make a difference. (The output will differ in more than just the spacing, but the main point is to note the overall approach and layout.) Actually having tried it myself just now, it seems you have lots of unnecessary white space within your eval strings -- once you get rid of all those evals, it'll all be nicer in many respects.