Evaluate this

Schmuck that I am, and despite the fact that I've been doing javascript for a decade now (though not all that much in recent years), I'd never really got how useful the eval() method is. Today, I found one of those points where I could not continue without it and thought I'd just post up where it helped me since there will be others after the same solution.
My problem: to create/declare javascript variable names dynamically. I have a loop in this little SVG experiment I'm doing with the Raphael javascript SVG library (another post to come on this) where I want to make a "set" of SVG elements out of each item in an array of unknown length. I also need to attach an onclick function to each set. For creating the set, putting items into it, and attaching the event handler I need a variable name to be made on the fly. This is how to declare it:

eval("var r" +i +" = dynamically named variable'");

If i is currently 2, this creates a string variable with the name r2 and the value "dynamically named variable". To get the variable value you have to use the eval() method again, thus:

alert(eval('r'+i));

Probably old hat, this stuff, but I'm not too proud to show my ignorance, at least when I've just reduced it slightly!