Yes, this has been discussed ad nauseam and no, there's not such a variable. Hence one should either maintain a counter like you did or, when the actual list happens to be an array as in your example, despite the appeal of iterating over an @array with aliasing to its elements, just iterate over 0..$#array and use subscripting.

Thanks to GrandFather and blazar for confirming this.

There is not. BTW, if you:

my $iteration_number = 0;
foreach my $val ( @array ) {
   $iteration_number ++;
   print ":$iteration_number:\n";
}
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then you know how may times the loop was entered by inspecting $iteration_number after the loop has completed.

for my $i ( 0 .. $#array ) {
   print "$i: $array[$i]\n";
}
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Note that a for/foreach loop that loops over x..y is very effecient. x..y doesn't get flattened into a list as it would elsewhere.

You may get this behavior with List::MoreUtils. The following presents two such solutions. They are not very pretty, but they work.

First, you may generate an index array with [ 0 .. $#array ] and use each_arrayref/each_array to produce an iterator that loops over possibly many arrays at a time.

use List::MoreUtils qw( each_arrayref );

my @a = qw( a b c d e );
my $each = each_arrayref( [ 0..$#a ], \@a );

while ( my ($idx, $v) = $each->() ) {
    print "$idx: $v\n";
}
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use List::MoreUtils qw( each_array );

my @a = qw( a b c d e );
my $each = each_array( @a );

while ( my $v = $each->() ) {
    my $idx = $each->('index');
    print "$idx: $v\n";
}
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