Sounds like you're after a coroutine, which unfortunately is not natively supported in perl. You might want to check out the Coro module which implements them with some success, or wait around for Perl6 ;-)

Of course there's always TIMTOWTDI and you could try something like this ...

{
    my $lex_sub;
    sub coro {
        my @lexvar = @_;
        $lex_sub = sub {
            print pop @lexvar, $/;
            return scalar @lexvar;
        } if not defined $lex_sub;
        $lex_sub->();
    }
}
my @words = qw(foo bar baz quux);
coro() while coro(@words);

__output__

quux
baz
bar
foo
[download]

But that is hackish, ugly and not much of a coroutine. I'd say stick with Coro or check out ruby for your coroutine fix.
HTH

_________
broquaint