I may be recalling incorrectly, but I think one of the bugfixes was to make formats respect lexical variables, so that you could turn your subroutine into the following:

sub printit { 
   my( $prefix_text, $left_text, $right_text ) = @_;
   $~ = "GRID"; write; 

format GRID =  
-------------------------------------------------------- 
@>>>: @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<    |     @<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< 
$prefix_text, $left_text, $right_text
-------------------------------------------------------- 
. 

}
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If that doesn't work, then I recall wrong. {grin}

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker