What't you're talking about is symbolic refrences. They are very bad and can lead to buggy and hard to maintain code.

What you should try instead is a hash-of-arrays. See the perldsc documentation for some details and examples. 

$data{city}[2]="Albany";
etc...

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In reply to Re: Using variable names from an array by lhoward
in thread Using variable names from an array by yams

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