I figured it out.. while executing the eval of the code referenced in the variable, the code snip was doing the print and returning that back to the handler, thus breaking the loop.. DOH.. as soon as I changed it to:

my $thing;
for(my $x=0; $x<=100000;$x++){
      $thing .+ "$x<br>";
}
print $thing;
[download]

It worked just fine..