"As a matter of fact, I wonder where newcomers come up with the tendency to gravitate toward symbolic references. They're not a part of the languages I grew up with such as ..."

Given that a large proportion of these sort of questions seem to have declarations like:

my ($var0, $var1, ..., $varN);
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I wonder if this is the result of learning array emulation in languages that don't support arrays.

Here's a rather contrived Bourne shell (circa 1978) example:

$ for i in 0 1 N; do eval var$i=x$i; done; echo "$var0 $var1 $varN"
x0 x1 xN
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I've encountered more recent scripting languages (i.e. from this millenium) which don't support arrays and emulate them in much the same way by tagging a number (index) onto a base variable name.