Yes you could do that with symbolic references, but you could actually just use an array @char, so that your characters would be stored in $char[0], $char[1], $char[2]. Besides, there's a simpler way to divide a string into chars : @char = split //, $string;

And if you want to have "automatic variable name" instead of "automatic variable number", you should use a hash instead of the array. Have a look at perldsc for more information on the subject.

The following echoes Eily's suggestion:

use strict;
use warnings;

my @AoA;

while (<DATA>) {
    chomp;
    push @AoA, [ split '' ];
}

for my $i ( 0 .. @AoA - 1 ) {
    for my $j ( 0 .. @{ $AoA[0] } - 1 ) {
        print "String $i; Char $j: '$AoA[$i]->[$j]'\n"
    }
    print "\n";
}

__DATA__
String 1.
Another 2
abcdefghi
[download]

Output:

String 0; Char 0: 'S'
String 0; Char 1: 't'
String 0; Char 2: 'r'
String 0; Char 3: 'i'
String 0; Char 4: 'n'
String 0; Char 5: 'g'
String 0; Char 6: ' '
String 0; Char 7: '1'
String 0; Char 8: '.'

String 1; Char 0: 'A'
String 1; Char 1: 'n'
String 1; Char 2: 'o'
String 1; Char 3: 't'
String 1; Char 4: 'h'
String 1; Char 5: 'e'
String 1; Char 6: 'r'
String 1; Char 7: ' '
String 1; Char 8: '2'

String 2; Char 0: 'a'
String 2; Char 1: 'b'
String 2; Char 2: 'c'
String 2; Char 3: 'd'
String 2; Char 4: 'e'
String 2; Char 5: 'f'
String 2; Char 6: 'g'
String 2; Char 7: 'h'
String 2; Char 8: 'i'
[download]

$AoA[$i]->[$j] explained:

$AoA[$i]->[$j]
      ^  ^  ^
      |  |  |
      |  |  + - Character number in string
      |  + - Dereferencing arrow
      + - String number in array
[download]

The above builds an array of arrays (AoA) by splitting each string on an empty string to create a list of the string's characters in an anonymous array whose reference is pushed onto @AoA. The nested loops iterate through the AoA, using the dereferencing arrow -> to access each character. The notation @{ $AoA[0] } - 1 was used to obtain the number of characters in the dereferenced array (effectively the string length), since you mentioned that each string had the same length.

Hope this helps!

Basically, I am comparing each character across a number of same-length strings

In Perl often a regex (regular expression) is what you need for this sort of situation. Also it is seldom necessary to use numeric indicies (or course, seldom does not mean "never"). Perl has a lot of cool iterators to process arrays and other structures of things without using an explicit index. That is actually very cool since right at the top of common coding errors is the "off by one" problem.

Anyway you dived pretty quick into asking how to access a string of characters as an array and it might be that what you really need to know is actually something else.