Tackling this problem via eval is possible with Perl, but it surely is not wise to attack this problem with this tool.

I guess you want something like the following, a hand-coded and much gentler version of eval, that only evaluates the intended stuff (untested):

use strict;

my %variable;
my %operation;

$operation{eq} = sub {
  my ($op1, $op2) = @_;
  return $op1 eq $op2;
};

$operation{ne} = sub {
  my ($op1, $op2) = @_;
  return $op1 ne $op2;
};

sub evaluate {
  my ($var,$op,$value) = @_;

  if (defined $operation{$op}) {
    my $code = $operation{$op};
    return $code->( $variable{$var}, $value );
  } else {
    die "Unknown operator : $op\n";
  };
};

$variable{foo} = 'FOO';
$variable{bar} = 'BAR';

my ($var,$op,$val);
foreach $var (keys %variable) {
  foreach $op (keys %operation) {
    foreach $val ('FOO','BAR','neither') {
      print "$var $op $val :", evaluate( $var, $op, $val ), "\n";
    };
  };
};
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More operators are added easily - you could now turn again to Perl to write these operators for you, but it is better to approach the problem slowly instead of drinking the whole sea at once :-)

Of course the above assumes that all your status variables are collected together in a separate hash, as it's a generally bad idea to use symbolic references (see Dominus' homepage for a discussion). If you really really really think you must get at the variable names from within your program, ask that in a separate question.

perl -MHTTP::Daemon -MHTTP::Response -MLWP::Simple -e ' ;    # The  
$d = new HTTP::Daemon and fork and getprint $d->url and exit;#spider
($c = $d->accept())->get_request(); $c->send_response( new   #in the
HTTP::Response(200,$_,$_,qq(Just another Perl hacker\n))); ' #  web
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