How about you try an implementation and see how it pans out? That way at least your teacher can see some progress, and we can see that you've done some work and are more likely to help with actual implementation problems you may have.

A good implementation would abstract the storage back end so you can get parsing and other front end stuff sorted out without bothering too much about an efficient back end, then if the simple first cut back end is too slow, replace it with something new when you've figured out where the problems are.

BTW, in Perl linked lists are just arrays. Using the various array functions like push, pop, shift and unshift along with splice you can efficiently manipulate arrays in very much the way you would a linked list.