@Steve-
I agree with how bad a practice this is, however, you do need the de(), otherwise you'll get an error along the lines of: Invalid CFML Construct on the first '<' character.
@Sahben1-
I had a typo on the second line where the variable name did not match, but de() and evaluate() exist in CF9. You may want to provide more information that whether it worked or not.
I am reminded of this phone call I had with a user:
User: "Is the Internet down."
Me: "No, I can access it just fine. What's wrong?"
User: "The Internet isn't working."
Me: "How is it not working?"
User: "I get an error message."
Me: "What does the error message say?"
User: "I don't have it on my screen now."
Me: "Please go to the Internet and provide me the error message."
User: "Welcome to the Intranet, please enter your username and password."
Me: "OK, that's not the Internet, that's our Intranet. And that is not an error message, it requires you logging into it in order to access it."
User: "Well I put my username and password in."
Me: "And what happened?"
User: "It didn't work."
Me: "HOW did it not work? Did it prompt you for the username and password again? Did it give you an error message?"
User: "It gave me an error message."
Me: "WHAT did the error message say?!"
User: "It says 'Your password has expired, please click the link to reset it."
Me: "Did you click the link?"
User: "No, I wanted to call you first to make sure the Internet wasn't down because of all these errors."
Me: "...INTRANET. And these are not errors. So far they were isntructions that you refused to perform at each step."
User: "It's not my job to fix these errors!"
Me: "...."
[phone call disconnected.]