Thanks to you all. I think I have less knowledge than you're asuming. Yes, I meant what shenme said; I don't know how to make square brackets display (now I do - put them inside code tags). I tried what fletcher suggested, and it worked, but I still don't know how to refer to the first variable inside the second loop. When I run

#!/usr/bin/perl
$a[1]{"blue"}=1;
$a[1]{"red"}=2;
$a[2]{"blue"}=3;
$a[2]{"red"}=4;
foreach $hash (@a)
    {
    foreach $word (keys %$hash)
        {
    print $firstval." ".$word." ".$hash->{$word}."\n";
        }
    }

I'd like to see 
1 blue 1
1 red 2
2 blue 3
2 red 4
[download]

but I don't know how to set $firstval to see that. I understand the idea of arrays and references (is a hash an array of references?), but I know only by rote when to use @, $, and % for arrays (and %$ is new to me). So does this mean that anytime a multidimensional array is partly associative, I have to use foreach for all loops on it? I thought there was a way to use for $i (1..n) for the numerical variables and foreach for the others, but I don't remember it. Phil Rennert