Instead of stating that some of the syntax looked "rather messy" I should have been a little more honest and stated that I don't really like any of it.

I think that my question and supporting code reflect a well thought out and well organized (please don't flame my yet) attempt by someone that is asking the question because they understand that they still don't quite "see the way". It was never my intention for "not too bad" to suggest "good". I did not like the "not too bad" code, but at least I didn't have to take time to count all the opening and closing curley brackets and square brackets to see if they matched up.

Perl is easy to get started with and hard to get good at. Perhaps I should have given my question the title "Help me with the issue of most other languages allowing arrays to have multiple dimensions and perl does not".

Actually, a good tutorial for someone good at perl to write would be "Multi Dimensional Arrays The Perl Way". Many of us "part time programmers" who spend most of our "part time" in other languages find it easy to stray to the "Dark Side" when we try to organize large collections of data in perl. If we are lucky enough to be able to read the full book and fully understand the full book before we program then we might "see the light" before we program. There are a lot of us out here who are not full time programmers and are forced to learn programming in small snapshots.

Not having multiple dimensions for arrays is one of the areas that cause trouble for "part time" "snapshot" programmers. And, to make matters worse, (and if I recall correctly) when we break code up into separate files to support reusing utility sections then we are forced to use references to pass data to subroutines. Wow, now I understand why I was seeking wisdom.

In reply to Re^2: multiple layers of referencing and dereferencing by Bruce32903
in thread multiple layers of referencing and dereferencing by Bruce32903

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