This is a terribly dirty thing to do, combining symbolic references and global variables, but I'm lowdown enough to show you how:

{
    my $name = 'a';
    sub separate_data {
        @{$name++} = split / /, $_[0];
    }
}
[download]

You'll need to do that under no strict qw(vars refs); . Can you think of a better design for what you're doing? Hint: hash.

After Compline,
Zaxo