Your suggestion was a good one IMHO, or at least very close to being good - look up dispatch tables and/or coderefs in super search and you should find something. They are a useful and elegant way of handling this kind of problem.

UPDATE: Look here for a small hint on the use of dispatch tables. Code also added below...

my $foo;
my $bar;
my @args;

# Get $foo $bar and @args somewhere around here...

my %despatch_table = ("one" => ( "alpha" => \&func_onealpha,
                                 "beta"  => \&func_onebeta),
                      "two" => ("alpha"  => \&func_twoalpha,
                                "beta"   => \&func_twobeta));

my $answer;

if ($answer = &${$despatch_table{$foo}}{bar}(@args))
{
    # Do something with $answer
}
else
{
    # Bad values throw an error
}


sub func_onealpha
{
    # Do stuff here
}

sub func_onebeta
{
    # Do stuff here
}

sub func_twoalpha
{
    # Do stuff here
}

sub func_twobeta
{
    # Do stuff here
}
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You use the string values of $foo and $bar as keys to the hash, which contains references to subroutines (in this case named, but can be anonymous subs in the hash itself. This is a bit of a rigmarole to go through, but ends up being better to work with than a huge nest of if statements.

Elgon

It is better either to be silent, or to say things of more value than silence. Sooner throw a pearl at hazard than an idle or useless word; and do not say a little in many words, but a great deal in a few.

Pythagoras (582 BC - 507 BC)