Auto Incrementing a Variable name?

Hi, I've been playing with this for a while now. Say I had the following variables: $name1 = "joe"; $name2 = "janis"; $name3 = "joanne"; Is there a way in php to increment the variable name not the value? Something like this.... for ($i = 1; $i <= 3; $i++) { $arr_name[$i] = $name.$i; // I want $name1,$name2,$name3 etc.... } This way say if I had 500 database queries that need to be updated I could just loop through each and just change the record id..... for ($i = 1; $i <= 500; $i++) { $query_update = "UPDATE table SET name=' $arr_name[$i]', WHERE person_id='$i"; $result_update = mysql_query($query_update) or die("Query failed"); } instead of doing something like this: $query_update1 = "UPDATE table SET name=' $name1', WHERE person_id='1"; $result_update1 = mysql_query($query_update1) or die("Query failed"); $query_update2 = "UPDATE table SET name=' $name2', WHERE person_id='2"; $result_update2 = mysql_query($query_update2) or die("Query failed"); $query_update3 = "UPDATE table SET name=' $name3', WHERE person_id='3"; $result_update3 = mysql_query($query_update3) or die("Query failed"); etc..... Anybody? There has to be a way of doing this... Thanks, Jeff