I'm going to assume this is an "is it possible" rather than an "is it a good idea" question.... You could do something evil with eval, like so: 
#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
use strict;

my $x = 1;
my $y = '$x';

eval "$y = 6";

print "X:$x\n";
print "Y:$y\n";

[download]
What do you think the output of the above script is?

Oh, and Sweeper reminded me in another thread of a USENET post by dominus called Why it's stupid to `use a variable as a variable name'

-Blake

In reply to Re: Using a varabile contained within another variable? by blakem
in thread Using a varabile contained within another variable? by blax

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