What Juerd tries to explain, IMVHO, is:

If you feel the need to access variables whose names are unbeknownst to you, you should use a hash, whose name is known to you, with these unkown names as keys.

There are very few situations where it's considered good design to use symbolic references (e.g. on-the-fly generation of objects implementing a known interface), and accessing variables is almost never one of them.

Just my $0.02...