This issue of dereferencing seems to come up frequently enough to deserve a page of tips, suggestions, warnings, etc.
The basic situation is that a user is trying, either intentionally or accidentally, to do pointer like design.
So they end up discovering they need to do something like:
set a "123"
set b "3.1415"
set c "The price of petrol in Peroria"
foreach var {a b c} {
puts [set $var]
}TV It's probably worth a page by itself as a subject. A pointer in C language sense is not the same as a indirect reference. Also, associations are not the same as referencing something by name and that is not the same as a pointer in C, in normal language or in for instance a URL. And a function, as clearly the case in tcl is referenced by name, and can be stored as a list.
The simple answer I guess is to use eval:
set whichvar b set b 11 eval puts $$whichvar
Which leaves a lot of questions about quoting, and preventing the evaluator to perform substitutions (possible through escaping).