I believe the sense of the monastery is that there are better ways to address the need to "reset" variables.

If you would post your script (in a new thread), I'm sure people would fall over themselves to come up with other ways of tackling this issue.

The reason this has kicked up such a furor is that other monks are trying to communicate a lesson to you that they have learned through personal experience: that adjusting one's approach so that it takes advantage of mainstream features (my, local, references and the like) leads to more reliable solutions than if they relied on a piece of Perl code to parse other Perl code.

If your other script really demonstrates the need for the variable-clearing technique you've posted, you could force those monks to eat their words. On the other hand, if the monks show you a simpler way to avoid this whole problem, you will have both learned something new and saved yourself from the significant effort involved in making your Perl parser more sophisticated.