in reply to Problems with 'strict' and variables created on the fly

Is it possible to have for a hash array element contain a list array? (a possible solution)

Well, yes!

Untested code:

my %pages; $pages{"page1"} = [ 1,2,3]; $pages{"page2"} = [ 5,6,7]; print $pages{"page1"}->[1]; print $pages{"page2"}->[2];

What you are looking for is a hash of arrays, which is a common perl idiom. Check out the perldsc and perllol manual pages.