Actually it will contain the array element ...

Actually, it will contain an alias to the array element. See choroba's reply.

>perl -wMstrict -le
"my @ra = (1, 2, 3, 4);
 print qq{@ra};
 ;;
 for my $n (@ra) {
   $n *= $n;
   }
 print qq{@ra};
"
1 2 3 4
1 4 9 16
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