Struggling with flashlite 1.0 Strings

Question

I'm using eval to simulate arrays. Setting values works fine for integers, but seems to completely fail for strings.

eval("array" add i-1) = arrayVal; // fails for string values

Getting values seems to work perfectly fine either way.

arrayVal = eval("array" add i-1); // works fine for strings and ints

Is there any way around this? I seriously do not want to use a horde of conditionals just to assign a string value.

For some reason, storing the empty string ("") into a variable converts it to null (or at least, when I try to retrieve it later, I get a null). I can find nothing in the documentation about this issue... Is this normal, or am I screwing up somewhere? Because it's a weird design choice if it is.