[Techtalk] Perl Frustration

[Kai MacTane]

I'm having a hard time trying something in Perl, and neither the Camel Book 
nor Google has been no help.

I want to declare a set of variables inside a loop, and have them be 
accessible to the rest of the program. It's not known until run-time just 
how many of these variables there are, or what their names will be. (They 
may be acquired from user input, or from a configuration file.)

I can do this the "insecure newbie" way, by not using strict checking or 
predeclaring any variables. But that's so naff it hurts.

I'm now trying to convert some old scripts of mine to "use strict" (and 
taint checking, and warnings). Now I need to declare all variables with 
"my" -- but that makes them local to their innermost enclosing block, so 
they're not visible outside the loop.

I have situations like this in a variety of scripts, so I'll just post some 
code that tries to boil the problem down to a very generalized case:

print "Enter names of some variables (blank to finish)...\n";
my $thisline;

chomp($thisline = <STDIN>);
while ($thisline =~/\w/) {
     $foovar = $thisline.'_foo';
     $$foovar = $thisline;
     chomp($thisline = <STDIN>);
}

# Now print out the main symbol table. (Code adapted from
# Camel Book, p. 281.)

foreach $symname (sort keys %main::) {
     local *sym = $main::{$symname};
     next if ($symname !~ /^\w/);
     print "\$$symname is defined\n" if defined $sym;
#   print "\@$symname is defined\n" if defined @sym;
#   print "\%$symname is defined\n" if defined %sym;
}

If I run this code, and enter "foo", "bar", and "wombat" for the user 
input, the output shows me that variables $foo_foo, $bar_foo and 
$wombat_foo have been created. But if I turn on "use strict" at the 
beginning, and try to do:

    my ($$foovar) = $thisline;

or even

    my (${$foovar}) = $thisline;

I get: Can't declare scalar dereference in ./testing my at line 11 near ") ="

I know there must be a way to do this, but how? Thanks in advance.

                                                 --Kai MacTane
----------------------------------------------------------------------
"Then, when they spill the demon seed
  Turn and face into the wind.
  All along you still believed...
  Believed you were immune."
                                                 --Thomas Dolby,
                                                  "The Flat Earth"