What you wrote (aside from your code) doesn't make sense to me, but let me give it a shot.
It sounds like you have an array of scalar strings and you want to append a increasing number to the string - almost like making the array index part of the value.
If that is the case, try this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;
my @array = qw(john jacob jingle heimer smitz);
my $index = 0;
foreach (@array) {
    $_ .= $index;
    $index++;
}
print "My new array looks like\n";
print "$_\n" foreach (@array);
[download]

If this isn't what you were trying to do - please explain further.

Hope this helps - cheers - L~R