The idiom of using hashes as a fast and easy lookup table is a common one in Perl. Hashes are quick, easy to setup and lend themselves well to a boolean-type comparisons like what you're talking about.

The only thing is your example of

%SampleHash (
    'whatever' => 'whatever',
    'whoever' => 'whoever',
)
[download]

is more commonly coded as

%SampleHash (
    'whatever' => 1,
    'whoever' => 1,
)
[download]

...simply because if you ain't gonna be using the values of the hash, there's no reason to make the value any longer than absolutely necessary. Making the value a "1" does the trick, and it doesn't waste memory. Of course, you're probably not likely to have a hash of values that's so big for the memory cost to matter much, but hey, waste not want not. :-)

Gary Blackburn
Trained Killer