Try that code with strictures (which you should always use: use strict; use warnings; - see The strictures, according to Seuss). It works without strictures because of some magic. That magic can make it very hard to write correct code and find errors when things go wrong.

You can achieve similar results by replacing the magic with a hash:

use strict;
use warnings;

my %arrays;

push @{$arrays{awesome_array}}, 1 .. 5;

for my $element(@{$arrays{awesome_array}}){
    print "$element\n";
    push @{$arrays{another_awesome_array}}, $element;
    }

for my $arrayName (keys %arrays) {
    print "$arrayName: @{$arrays{$arrayName}}\n"
}
[download]

Prints:

1
2
3
4
5
awesome_array: 1 2 3 4 5
another_awesome_array: 1 2 3 4 5
[download]

That won't work under use strict;, and for very good reasons: How can I use a variable as a variable name? and Why it's stupid to `use a variable as a variable name'.

If you really needed this type of functionality, you could use hashes of arrays instead, see e.g. perldsc along with perlreftut and perlref.

use warnings;
use strict;

my %data;

my $string = "awesome_array";
my $other_string = "another_awesome_array";

push @{$data{$string}}, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5;

foreach my $element (@{$data{awesome_array}}) {
    print "$element\n";
    push @{$data{$other_string}}, $element;
}

print @{$data{another_awesome_array}};
[download]