Why? I would have expected that using the foreach $string acutally is assigned to whatever is the element of the array but aparently this is not the case.

Turn on strict and warnings and you'll see why.

use warnings;
use strict;

my $sref = \$string;
foreach $string ( @array_of_strings ) {
    print $$sref;
}


$ perl sref_o.pl
Global symbol "$string" requires explicit package name at sref_o.pl li
+ne 4.
Global symbol "$string" requires explicit package name at sref_o.pl li
+ne 5.
Global symbol "@array_of_strings" requires explicit package name at sr
+ef_o.pl line 5.
Execution of sref_o.pl aborted due to compilation errors.

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