Thanks for all your suggestions. I have put several of them to use.

perrin's suggestion works fine, but adds verbosity.

Using 'do' didn't seem to help and gave me the same error.

zaxo confirmed the compiletime issue.

Thus, dragonchild's suggestion for using BEGIN worked fine. Also, I really like his wizardry for getting all the constants into @EXPORT without typing them all. I incorporated that technique. Thanks!

I also used Grygonos's suggestion simplifying the creation of all the constants.

I'm gonna need to spend some time studying jhourcle's XML technique.

friedo's technique looks similar to dragonchild's but I didn't have enum.pm installed so haven't checked it out yet.

I have learned many lessons o wise ones!