One of Perl’s great design-strengths is its flexible memory management options and high-performance data structures.   You can, through “references,” string-up all sorts of elaborate contraptions in memory and, for the most part, forget about them.   But one thing that you really don’t use, much if at all, is the C-style notion of a struct.   Instead, you build using hashes, arrays (lists), and, within both of those, references.   There are a lot of perldocs on these topics which people rarely get around to actually reading.