Thanks for suggestions, but I'm afraid that initializing the array with references instead of string literals would require lots of work in the context I'd need it.

I actually stumbled upon this, but it relies on no strict 'refs', and I'm left wondering if there's a way to do something similiar with use strict?

my @ary = qw( test another_test third_test );
my $sub_i_want_to_call = $ary[rand(@ary)];

{
  no strict 'refs';
  &{$sub_i_want_to_call};
}
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yes, use the names as lookups into the symbol table, e.g.

use strict;
use warnings;

sub test {
  print "something";
}

sub another_test {
  print "something else";
}

sub third_test {
  print "another unimaginative statement";
}

$\ = "\n";
my @ary = qw( test another_test third_test );
my $sub_i_want_to_call = $main::{$ary[rand(@ary)]};
$sub_i_want_to_call->();
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See perlmod for the gory details of how it works.

Thanks, this is exactly what I was looking for. =)

The OO version looks interesting too though, and I might end up using it instead.

Thanks to all of you! :)

&{$sub_i_want_to_call};

You probably want that to be &{$sub_i_want_to_call}(); (or the equivalent $sub_i_want_to_call->()). Subroutine calls with & but without parens give the callee direct access to the caller's @_, including the ability to modify it:

$ perl -w
sub foo { my $foo = shift }
sub bar { &foo; warn @_ }
bar("baz","quux","\n");
__END__
quux
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