I echo GrandFather's reply.

I'd also like to emphasize that Super Search is your friend. Searching for 'loop array index' finds a couple of recent threads that are quite relevant:

• array looping with foreach, which leads to Re: What's missing in Perl 5.10
• A question of perlish elegance on array loop

Those threads mention functions from two modules (in case you'd rather use one than roll your own method): each from Array::Each::Override and natatime from List::MoreUtils. After looking through the docs for the latter I think each_array is more appropriate here.

use warnings;
use strict;

use List::MoreUtils qw( each_array );

my @array = ( 'a' .. 'g' );

my $a_obj = each_array( @array );

while( my $var = $a_obj->() )
{
    my $i = $a_obj->( 'index' );
    print "got $var at $i\n";
}
[download]

got a at 0
got b at 1
got c at 2
got d at 3
got e at 4
got f at 5
got g at 6
[download]