Thanks ishnid. Great practical solution that I have adapted:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use warnings;
use CGI::Carp qw(fatalsToBrowser);
use HTML::Template;
use strict;
use CGI;

my $query = new CGI;
     
my $t = $query->param('type');
    
my @option;    
   $option[1] = $query->param('option1');
   $option[2] = $query->param('option2');
   $option[3] = $query->param('option3');
   $option[4] = $query->param('option4');
        
my $template = HTML::Template->new(filename => '../htmltemplatetests.t
+mpl', associate => $query,die_on_bad_params => 0);

{
no strict 'subs';
$template->param(
   type.$t => "1",
   option.$_ => $option[$_]) for (1 .. 7);
 }
print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";        
print $template->output();
exit();
[download]

Of course, the bare 'type' template param returns a strict error, hence the no strict 'subs'. However, all the warnings notwithstanding, I think I'm relatively safe. Thanks all.