in reply to creating variables in a loop

No, you really don't want to do that. You only think you want to do that. Instead, you want a hash, with keys of "q1" through "q40". Or even an array where elements indexed 1 to 40 are your values. That'd be something like this: 
my @q;
for (1..40) {
  $q[$_] = param("q$_");
}

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-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
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In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom