This does the trick...

use Modern::Perl;
my @t   = qw(name John number 7 status unknown);
my $str = '';
while (@t) {
    $str .= sprintf('%s=%s', shift @t, shift @t);
    $str .= '&' if @t;
}
say $str;
[download]

Though if what you're trying to do is construct a query string for a URI, you want to use URI::Escape, which will escape any special characters in your string. (For example, what if one of the strings in your array already contains an equals sign?)

use Modern::Perl;
use URI::Escape qw/uri_escape/;
my @t   = qw(name John number 7 status unknown);
$t[1] = 'John Smith';  # something that needs escaping
my $str = '';
while (@t) {
    $str .= sprintf(
        '%s=%s',
        uri_escape(shift @t),
        uri_escape(shift @t),
        );
    $str .= '&' if @t;
}
say $str;
[download]

It's a shame you said that the order matters. If it didn't, then casting your array to a hash would be a neat trick:

use Modern::Perl;
use URI::Escape qw/uri_escape/;
my @t   = qw(name John number 7 status unknown);
my %th  = @t;   # cast to hash
my $str = join '&',
    map { sprintf '%s=%s', uri_escape($_), uri_escape($th{$_}) }
    keys %th;
say $str;
[download]

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