I have decided to attempt this with hashes, however am now confused as to why my loop doesn't evaluate the table in order. For example, this code:

use strict;

my %table = qw/test0 0 test1 1 test2 2 test3 3 test4 4 test5 5 test6 6
+ test7 7/;

while ( my($key, $value) = each(%table) ) {
    if ($value ne '0') { print "$key = $value\n" }
}
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...produces the following result:

test5 = 5

test7 = 7

test1 = 1

test4 = 4

test6 = 6

test3 = 3

test2 = 2