i agree with merlyn 100%, what you are trying to do is basically (as far as I understand it) symbolic references. And let me tell you, that is the slippery slope to hell. Very few projects that use symbolic references will be able to either scale well or be able to be undertood a few months after you have written it. On top of it all, as far as I understand it, it wont work with strict (back me up on this one, or correct me...) Analyze your problem a bit more and attempt to make the logic fit the data, not the data fit the logic, I have never encountered a program where i NEEDED symbolic references, where I couldn't either use hashes or rethink my problem a bit more. As merlyn said what you want to do is something along these lines:

my $h         = { "num" => [1], "alpha" => ["a"]}; 
my @vars    = ("num", "alpha");

foreach my $val (@vars) {
    push(@{$h->{$val}}, $val); 
}
[download]

i think.... then again, i may not understand your problem...