Actually, that won't work. "." is the concatenation operator, and isn't part of a valid Perl identifier (variable name). Secondly, you're missing quotes on the right hand side of that assignment.

perl -e 'print "How sweet does a rose smell? "; chomp ($n = <STDIN>); 
+$rose = "smells sweet to degree $n"; *other_name = *rose; print "$oth
+er_name\n"'
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