Have a look at perlretut:

What is a regular expression? A regular expression is simply a string that describes a pattern. [...] In Perl, the patterns described by regular expressions are used to search strings, extract desired parts of strings, and to do search and replace operations.

 /($what){3}/;

To have this expression operate on $what, you would need to write it $what =~ /($what){3}/;. But even then, it won't match, because it would try to match the contents of $what 3 times. In this case, you would be better off with the x operator. You probably also want to print a newline at the end:

use 5.012;
use warnings;
my $what = 'ram' x 3;
print $what, "\n";
[download]

Or even...

use 5.012;
use warnings;
say 'what' x 3;
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Your code should always use warnings;, and usestrict; or use5.012; (or later), which automatically enables 'strict'. You might usediagnostics as well. All of these will help you understand and avoid many errors.