Create a variable name with "paste" in R?

In my case function eval() works very good. Below I generate 10 variables and assign them 10 values.

lhs <- rnorm(10)
rhs <- paste("perf.a", 1:10, "<-", lhs, sep="")
eval(parse(text=rhs))

You can use assign (doc) to change the value of perf.a1:

> assign(paste("perf.a", "1", sep=""),5)
> perf.a1
[1] 5

See ?assign.

> assign(paste("tra.", 1, sep = ""), 5)
> tra.1
  [1] 5