You probably should look at Lexical::Alias.

The module appears to complain if you try to use it with a version of perl prior to 5.8.0, but there is a comment in the pod saying that thanks to a bug fix (by tye), it should now work with versions greater than 5.005.

Presumable it would be a case of modifying the test if you are using an earlier version.

Update: An example of use.

P:\test>perl -MLexical::Alias
my( @a, $x, $y, $z );
@a = 'A' .. 'Z';
alias( $a[23], $x );
alias( $a[24], $y );
alias( $a[25], $z );
print "$x : $y : $z\n";
^Z
X : Y : Z
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