was a complete botch,
and 5.10 extends that botch to the use of hashes. Perl 5 should move toward the Perl 6 model of a single lexical variable containing all the information from the last match, and then any variables like
are just aliases into that structure. Parallel global arrays and hashes are madness, even if I could keep straight which one is the beginning and which one is the end, which I can't.
And parallel hashes force you to do the hash lookup twice.
Madness...