Late in the day, I know, But how about this; Your progy as above with this sub:

sub member {
        my $input = shift;
        my $list = shift;
        my @array = ();
		
        for (@$list) {
                $array$_ = 1;
        }
        if ($array$input) {return 1} else {return 0};
}

Would only work for numerical data so you'd need to test for that but it sounds like that was what you were doing anyway.