Because the "pages" really are close to web pages (or CGI scripts?). It is too difficult to explain without giving some more detail about the application, so I will: the application is an interactive projection system that plays what we call "spots", which are short interactive segments with graphics and behavior that users will play with. The spots are organized into a playlist that loops repeatedly. The authors of the spots are artists -- technically-minded artists, but still much stronger artistically than technically -- and I do not want to burden them with the overhead of constructing proper Perl objects. Also, the spots aren't really reusable in any useful way. (The fragments that are, I pull out and create objects out of, but the original authors don't know how to.)

So although I don't think it would work to encapsulate them as objects, it might be a good idea to take a hint from Apache::Registry and wrap them in subroutines.

Oh, and as long as a playlist is active, I don't really have any problems; all of the spots can stay alive in the interpreter. The problem comes when I switch to another playlist -- I want to free up everything from the first playlist. Also, when switching back to a playlist, I want it to be running in a clean environment, and not find little fragments of earlier incarnations of itself lying around. At the same time, the interpreter is used for other things, so I don't want to just kill and recreate it.