in reply to eval not behaving like I expected... why?

Your eval statement declares several lexical variables, but then you expect them to be available via the symbol table as globals! That won't work, just as the following won't work:
my $foo = "blah"; print $main::foo; ## whoops, not the same variable
In addition, eval creates a fresh lexical scope, so the scope of the lexical variables is only within that eval. You can't get such a thing to work with lexicals + eval:
eval 'my $foo = 1'; print $foo; ## whoops, outside of $foo's scope
It defeats one of the major purposes of lexical variables (that is, compile-time checking of variable bindings). You'll have to use either globals, or perhaps a hash of values if you want to instantiate variables via eval (and have them visible from outside the eval).

blokhead