You want to stop after you have

• looked at N elements, or
• reached the end of the array.

You have chosen to put the "N elements" idea in the loop control and add a test for the end of the array. How about reversing this? Looping over an array is so easy in Perl. Adding a counter to quit after N elements is not much harder.

use constant N => 3;
my $counter;

my @a = 'A' .. 'Z';

$counter = 1;
ELEMENT:
foreach my $val (@a) {
    last ELEMENT if $counter++ > N;
    print "Looking at $val\n";
}
[download]

Looking at A
Looking at B
Looking at C
[download]