You are using symbolic references, which cannot point to lexical (my) variables. (use strict would have told you that.)

In general, this is a path to much pain. You would (usually) be better off using a hash. (There are a very few cases where the symbolic references might be a better choice, but the odds of this being one of them is really slim.

my %greeting;
my @names = ('peter', 'jonah', 'larry');

foreach my $n (@names) {
   $greeting{$n} = "i like $n";
}

print "$greeting{peter} \n $greeting{jonah} \n $greeting{larry} \n";
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Of course, there's always more than one way.

my %greeting = map { $_ => "i like $_" }
               ('peter', 'jonah', 'larry');

print join( " \n ", @greeting{qw/peter jonah larry/} ),
      " \n";
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