I don't understand WHY would you want the ever-changing globals. The whole idea of "current buffer" sounds a little silly to me. (No offence meant!) Why would you want to restrict yourself to one "current" buffer, having to "switch" buffers, having to remember in what part of the program the variables point to this buffer and when to the other? This is like having to use

select(OUT);
print "To the file\n";
select(STDOUT);
print "To the screen\n";
[download]

I think that your "strings on steroids" could be nice, but why don't you keep the "variables" as some properties/fields of the object? So you are going to have to use $obj->{varname} or $obj->{PROP}{varname} instead of $var, who cares? I would not want a single statement to change the values of tens of totaly unrelated variables that might have been at some point declared as "per-buffer".

I'd say forget the globals and start coding in Perl5. Maybe you'll find out that 1) the syntactic sugar is not that important and 2) that you may make most of it even in Perl5.

IMHO the biggest problem is that people will want to be able to change the text inside the buffer as easily as they do change strings. Eg. to be able to apply a s/regexp/relacement/g to the buffer. THAT will be a challenge with all those markers laying around.

Jenda
Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.
   -- Rick Osborne