Is what I suggested possible?

Writing Perl that creates variables with a name specified at run time is pretty easy, but it's generally not a good idea.

 $name = 'foo';
$$name = 'bar';
print "foo = $foo\n";
__END__
foo = bar
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Note that doesn't work if you use strict (which is always a good idea). In that case, you wind up with something like this:

my $name = 'foo';
{   
    no strict 'refs';
    $$name = 'bar';
}
print "foo = $main::foo\n";
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See how I still had to use the explicit package name to refer to the variable for printing.

You can do a lot with eval too.