Nano's Blog

Don’t use “my” again and again to declare $rock[0], $rock[1] etc. Declare the array once (@rocks) once and use it.

you need to declare my @rocks and then not use my any more when referring to $rocks[xxx].
If you don’t know how many elements are going to be in there, you can use push to add new elements into the (initially 0-sized) array.

- from StackOverflow.com

#!C:\Perl\bin\perl.exe
# activePerl 5.8 based
use strict; # enabled
use warnings; 

my @rocks; 

($rocks[0], $rocks[1]) = qw/Hello World/;  

$rocks[2] = 'Tom';
$rocks[3] = 'Cat'; 

print $rocks[0];
print $rocks[1];
print $rocks[2];
print $rocks[3];