It seems to me you could avoid a lot of this by writing an Autoload method that handles your accessor problems. A standard one (lifted from Damian Conway's Awesome "Object Oriented Perl") looks like:

sub AUTOLOAD {

    my ($self,$newval) = @_;

    if ($AUTOLOAD =~ /.*::get_(\w+)/){
        return $self->{$1};
    }elsif($AUTOLOAD =~ /.*::set_(\w+)/){
        $self->{$1} = $newval;
    }else{
        croak "$AUTOLOAD is not a method";
    }

}
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You could then just call something like my $value = $object->get_items_in_order(); and avoid a begin block and the overhead of eval'ing altogether. With some minor modifications, the Autoload could deal with your array reference problems I think (unless I misunderstood).