This whole idea makes me want to throw my hands in the air and run out of the room screaming as though my hair were on fire

I knew that would be the response when I posted! Still, I'm curious to know how to get this to work.

It should not be "use gen_var($one);", but rather, "use gen_var qw( one );"

But wouldn't that import the subroutine "one" and not the variable "$one"?

As long as you're doing this, wouldn't it be easier to directly manipulate the symbol table as a hash?

I did try that accessing the symbol table. Say each variable was an object and not a scalar

package gen_var;
use banana;
my @variables = qw(one two three);
my $counter = 1;

foreach my $variable (@variables) {
   no strict;
   *$variable = banana->new($counter++)
}

1;
[download]

and from the classing package:

use gen_var;

$one->get_counter();
[download]

That doesn't work, but I'm not sure how to fix it...