If you intend to export 500 things, then I would argue that there is something fundamentally wrong with the design.

As what I would call a "sanity check", go look at some HUGE Perl modules. Some of these things have mind-bending, brain-twisting, byzantine complexity, but NONE that I've found have a module that exports 500 things! A dozen? Yeah! Some dozens or even a hundred, maybe! But 500? No!

Perl has amazing abilities to deal with arrays and complex structures without the use of indicies, without needing a #define statement. Say:

@stuff = my($low_temp, $high_temp, $average_temp = split(/\s+/,$line);
+ 
$stuff[0] is $low_temp. 
Do I need a #define LOW_TEMP 0\ /*low_temp var*/$stuff[LOW_TEMP]? NO! 
I just use the variable name that has just been declared: $low_temp.
Forget the idea of $stuff[0] or $stuff[LOW_TEMP].
[download]

If you could make a short example of why you need so many global variables, it would be helpful because I don't know how to help you further with the data that I have so far.