I think this is a completely general way to do this. It will need some cleanup to be used in a real app though, because of the globals. (i was struggling with getting bizarre_sort() to take parameters properly. :(

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my @order_array;
my %types = (
    0    =>    'alpha',
    1    =>    'alpha',
    2    =>    'numeric',
);

{
    my @data = (
        ["sean",    "peters",    29],
        ["matt",    "horner",    23],
        ["dorthy",    "radley",    49],
        ["tom",        "curtis",    52],
        ["sean",    "jones",    38],
    );


    print "By first name:\n";
    sorter([0], @data);

    print "\nBy last name:\n";
    sorter([1], @data);

    print "\nby age:\n";
    sorter([2], @data);

    print "\nby first then last:\n";
    sorter([0,1], @data);

    print "\nby first then age:\n";
    sorter([0,2], @data);
}


sub sorter {
    my ($order, @data) = @_;

    @order_array = @$order;
    foreach my $person (sort bizarre_sort @data  ) {
        for my $i (0 .. 2) {
            print $person->[$i] . " ";
        }
        print "\n";
    }
}


sub bizarre_sort {

    foreach my $field_num (@order_array) {
        my $result = low_checker($field_num, $types{$field_num}, $a, $
+b);
        return $result if $result;
    }

    # in case there was equality on all keys
    return 1;
}


sub low_checker {
    my ($field_num, $type, $a, $b) = @_;

    if ( $type eq "alpha" ) {
        if ( $a->[$field_num] cmp $b->[$field_num] ) {
            return ($a->[$field_num] cmp $b->[$field_num]);
        }
    }
    elsif ( $type eq "numeric" ) {
        if ( $a->[$field_num] <=> $b->[$field_num] ) {
            return ($a->[$field_num] <=> $b->[$field_num]);
        }
    }
    else {
        confess();
    }
}
[download]

longwinded, someone can probably make this cleaner.