What would be necessary though to treat the stuff in the attribute as a block, not evaluate it to an expression.

You could fix that by supplying an anonymous subroutine as the argument. That way, if someone really wanted it to be the same, it would be the same. The attribute would work exactly like other subroutines that take default values. Of course, there is no such thing as attribute arguments today (only "annotations"), but maybe some day in the future.

lodin