They're not really necessary most of the time, since you can just set a scalar to a string without having to worry about giving it a mnemonic value: For instance, instead of defining an enum and then writing

    my $type_of_fruit = enum->{'ORANGE'};
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you can just go $my type_of_fruit = 'orange';. This kind of logic is the most common use of enums I've seen in C.

Of course, numerical comparisons will be faster than string comparisons, so if you are examining many such values (e.g. in an extended chain of elsif's) then a C-like enum might be useful. What were you planning to do with your enum? That's probably the right question to ask.

Just my $.02. Perl is different from C. It may not make sense to use the same idioms you learned in C.