You might be wanting an array of references to the variables, however, in which case you just prefix each of the variable names with a '\' symbol in the list you're assigning to @VARIABLES.

To save some typing you can take a reference to the list of variables instead of to each variable in the list.

$ perl -Mstrict -wle '
> my $val1 = 99;
> my $val2 = 77;
> print $val1;
> print $val2;
> my @vars = \ ( $val1, $val2 );
> ${ $vars[ 0 ] } = 55;
> ${ $vars[ 1 ] } = 33;
> print $val1;
> print $val2;'
99
77
55
33
$
[download]

I hope this is of interest.