Hello, and (hopefully) noob questions

Hello, I'm new to this list, and PostgreSQL.

Although new to PostgreSQL I have been an Oracle DBA in the past, and
perhaps this is the problem. I keep trying to do things that are simple in
Oracle, and I feel like I'm banging my head against the wall!

First, I am developing on a windows vista laptop. VERSION = 'PostgreSQL
8.4.3, compiled by Visual C++ build 1400, 32-bit'. I have installed
ActivePerl to implement the language PLPERL.

Question 1:

I understand there are no packages, and thus no global variables in
Postgres. That's fine, because section 40.4 of the PostgreSQL comprehensive
documentation shows how to do this using PLPERL
(http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/interactive/plperl-global.html). The
examples compiles fine for me, but the output does not behave as
anticipated:

prod1=# select util.set_var('foo','bar');

set_var

---------

ok

(1 row)

prod1=# select util.get_var('foo');

get_var

-----------------

CODE(0x1738674)

(1 row)

I have no idea what the get_var output means. Note that the example usage
of "set_var" in the documentation has a typo (Three single quotes), and is
therefore unexecutable, so I'm not convinced that this section of the
documentation was highly QA'd... Has anyone made this PL/Perl script work,
or found another method to implement global values? I need to dynamically
create and store probably a few hundred global values of all datatypes.

Question 2:

When operating interactively inside sqlplus, I was able to pass parameters
into scripts. Eg. "@myscript.sql arg1 arg2". I cannot seem to do this when
operating interactively inside psql. Eg. "\i myscript.sql arg1 arg2" returns
the error "\i: extra argument "arg1" ignored", "\i: extra argument "arg2"
ignored", etc.

I do not want to use \set to "preset" my interactive parameters. I *could*
write an external perl script that would use the -c flag to interactively
pass in \set parameters, but I would prefer to keep everything as
conceptually simple as possible for my analysts.

Any suggestions on how to address these two problems (implementing
global/session variables, and passing in parameters to SQL scripts), please
let me know. If there is a more appropriate place for me to ask these
questions, also let me know.

Thanks in advance,

Daniel