Some further context seems indeed to be appropriate.
In our version control system, we have rules to associate the names of some objects with a specific location in a directory structure.
We made a perl wrapping around our VC system to automate this logic and to avoid the creation of too many categories. At that time, we were already faced with a history of objects which did not fit the pattern.
For these objects , hashes were created, as a kind of exception to the rule and these were initialized at the loading the module.
Alas, as so often happens, exceptions proliferated, so this list became rather long, which lead to my question above.
To be short, a (huge) hash has to be initialised at run time.
Tabari

In reply to Re^2: __DATA__ used in BEGIN by Tabari
in thread __DATA__ used in BEGIN by Tabari

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