I am writing a natural language processing program to take in responses from a user and give responses back.

I would like to set up a data structure in which I initialize the questions my bot will ask at the beginning of the program. I'm using a hash mapped to different questions.

Is there a way to use another variable within the definitions of these hash values? I'm finding that since I'm initializing the hash at the beginning, if I update a variable value later on, it will not pick up the changed value. I guess I need a pointer, rather than a flat variable? I don't really understand the section on hard vs symbolic references in Ch. 8 of 'learning perl', or am absolutely sure if this is the right direction...

Is there a special way I should be referencing my variable to make it look up the value for it (when I output it, which would be most useful), or do I need to refresh all the initializations each time I get new user input?

If this is unclear, pls let me know; I can post the code...

Thanks in advance,
techgirl

In reply to Setting variables inside a hash: newbie question by techgirl

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