The array slurps everithing in the assignment. This is one of the cases in which prototypes may come handy. Check perlsub to learn more about them.

sub cog_class (\@$) {
    my $name = pop;
    print "NAME $name\n";
    for (@{ $_[0] }) {  # Note the Perl-style c<for> loop!!
        # BLAH BLAH
    }
}
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Or else, even avoiding to mess up with prototypes (if you don't really need them), you must extract the single scalar params you want manually.