Well, if you use next to leave an eval, you're effectively leaving the eval container to get back to your main program or whatever. Logically, a next command should take you to a block in the same container, shouldn't it? I mean, if you write a subroutine with a next command, Perl would expect the next command to refer to a local label. Same with eval commands, I'm guessing. It's like pointing to someone in the Marketing department to get an Engineering task done, which defeats the purpose of encapsulating things into evals and subs. The 'damage' would be limited to confusion when/if things don't work as expected.

Update: hofmator below gives a better answer, I think. It basically comes down to the fact that eval isn't built specifically for looping, so you should probably use another structure (like do) if possible.

andre germain
"Wherever you go, there you are."