Of course if the arrays are big, copying them is waste of time and memory. Let's see how can we access the individual elements of an array when using a reference to that array. Then we won't have to copy them within the function.

my $names_ref = \@names;

Array      Array Reference
@names     @{ $names_ref }
$names[0]  ${ $names_ref }[0]
           $names_ref->[0]
$#names    $#$names_ref