Unless you can have gaps in your orders (eg: POPE at 0 and CARDINAL at 3 but nothing in between) you can consider your array as a hash that uses a number as key (you just access elements with $hierarchy[$pos] instead of $hierarchy{$pos}). BTW, if you are using the position to select your data rather than the name, it should be the key, not the value.

When I say that an array can be used as a hash (with keys 0..N), you can even use each on it:

while (my ($key, $value) = each @ARGV)
{
  print "$value: $key\n"; # The key is the position
}
[download]

And if your version of perl is not too old, use a hash slice to extract pairs of position/element:

use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper { %ARGV[0,1,3] };
[download]

Edit: so you can also get your hash with %hierarchy = reverse %ARGV[0..$#ARGV] if you want to keep the names as key.

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