If you want to use soft references, the you'll need to be a little more careful. First, you need say no strict 'refs'; if you didn't say use strict; beforehand. To do what you'd like to do, you need to use quotes like so: print "1st member of $type = ", ${"arr_$type"}[0]; However, REAL references are the way to go. Make a hash, whose keys are the possible return values of get_type(). Each value in this hash will be an array reference.

my %arrays = (
  type1 => [ "look", "at", "me", "go", ],
  type2 => [ "watch", "me", "exeunt", ],
  type3 => [ "see", "me", "disappear", ],
);

$type = get_type();

print "element 1 if $type is $arrays{$type}[0]\n";
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To learn how to use references, look at the perlref documentation.