I know it's a contrived example, but really, data this related should be kept in records (here, that would be hashes) rather than parallel arrays:

my @names = (
  {'first' => 'john',  'last' => 'brown'},
  {'first' => 'jacob', 'last' => 'black'},
  ...
  );
[download]

It really does make manipulating the data much easier. The only time that I can think of where you'd have to split related data among separate arrays is if you were doing matrix-based numerical stuff with it, and even then you're probably best off building the matrices from an intermediate (and more domain-specific) data structure.

Yours in pedantry,

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