That said, as far as I can see, tie works only on named variables:

So in the process of solving one issue, I could be introducing many more.

Um. The problem is that your map is returning the return value from tie, instead of the tied variable.

If you change the map so:

   my @months = map{tie my $var, i18n::String2, $_; $var } qw(January 
+February);
[download]

That problem goes away also. (I made a similar error myself earlier:)

Provided that your _(...) sub does the right thing, your users need never be aware that they are dealing with anything other than simple scalars.

So, trade your (one-time, up-front) care (and a little getting up to speed with the ins and outs of tie), as you develop your solution, for ongoing and continuous care by all your programmers?

Your choice, but I know which way I would go :)