in reply to Make a hash by a range of keys and values

This is similar to already proposed solutions except that it uses maps rather than loops. I'm only posting it because others might be interested in the way you can pass a subroutine reference to Data::Dumper->Sortkeys() to control the key sort order; I'd not seen this before but went looking in the docs for a solution when I realised that magic-incrementing the key beyond "z" would make a mess of the default ->Sortkeys() output.

use 5.026;
use warnings;

use Data::Dumper;

my $numX = 5;
my $numY = 7;

my $key = q{a};
my %posns =
   map {
           my $y = $_;
           map {
                   my $x = $_;
                   $key ++ => [ $x, $y ]
               } 0 .. $numX - 1 ;
       } 0 .. $numY - 1;

my $rcKeySorter = sub {
   my $rhPosns = shift;
   my @sortOrder =
      map { unpack q{x4a*}, $_ }
      sort
      map { pack q{Na*}, length, $_ }
      keys %{ $rhPosns };
   return \ @sortOrder;
   };

print Data::Dumper
   ->new( [ \ %posns ], [ qw{ *posns } ] )
   ->Sortkeys( $rcKeySorter )
   ->Dumpxs();

[download]

The output.

%posns = (
           'a' => [
                    0,
                    0
                  ],
           'b' => [
                    1,
                    0
                  ],
           'c' => [
                    2,
                    0
                  ],
           'd' => [
                    3,
                    0
                  ],
           'e' => [
                    4,
                    0
                  ],
           'f' => [
                    0,
                    1
                  ],
           'g' => [
                    1,
                    1
                  ],
           'h' => [
                    2,
                    1
                  ],
           'i' => [
                    3,
                    1
                  ],
           'j' => [
                    4,
                    1
                  ],
           'k' => [
                    0,
                    2
                  ],
           'l' => [
                    1,
                    2
                  ],
           'm' => [
                    2,
                    2
                  ],
           'n' => [
                    3,
                    2
                  ],
           'o' => [
                    4,
                    2
                  ],
           'p' => [
                    0,
                    3
                  ],
           'q' => [
                    1,
                    3
                  ],
           'r' => [
                    2,
                    3
                  ],
           's' => [
                    3,
                    3
                  ],
           't' => [
                    4,
                    3
                  ],
           'u' => [
                    0,
                    4
                  ],
           'v' => [
                    1,
                    4
                  ],
           'w' => [
                    2,
                    4
                  ],
           'x' => [
                    3,
                    4
                  ],
           'y' => [
                    4,
                    4
                  ],
           'z' => [
                    0,
                    5
                  ],
           'aa' => [
                     1,
                     5
                   ],
           'ab' => [
                     2,
                     5
                   ],
           'ac' => [
                     3,
                     5
                   ],
           'ad' => [
                     4,
                     5
                   ],
           'ae' => [
                     0,
                     6
                   ],
           'af' => [
                     1,
                     6
                   ],
           'ag' => [
                     2,
                     6
                   ],
           'ah' => [
                     3,
                     6
                   ],
           'ai' => [
                     4,
                     6
                   ]
         );

[download]

I hope this is of interest.

Cheers,

JohnGG

In Section Seekers of Perl Wisdom