and really, couldn't this whole chain of stuff be done automaticaly? laziness, man. you've typed basically the same line 50 times.

How do you know he didn't do it automatically? :) At any rate, yes you could have it generated programatically. If they weren't lexically declared and were stuck in their own package you could just slurp from the symbol table. But something like this would work in this case where they are lexicals.

{
  no strict 'refs';

  my @chrs = ( 'a'..'h', 'k', 'm', 'n', 'p'..'z' );
  push @chrs, map uc, @chrs;
  push @chrs, 2..9;

  $charlist{ $_ } = \@{"char_$_"} foreach @chrs;
}
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