Actually, there's no need to use {} in this situation, since the reference is a simple variable, not something like @{$arr[0]}. You can just do @$ref. Also, as a matter of general policy, you don't want to use $a, since it's one of the variables Perl uses for sorting.

use strict;
use warnings;
my @x = qw/a b c/;
my $x = \@x;
print "Array elements with spaces: @$x";
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