You are talking about a hash (otherwise known as an associative array). Here's an example of the Perlish way to construct an associative array similar to what you're depicting.

use Data::Dumper;
my %world = ( 'fruits' => { 
                            'p' => 'peach',
                            'g' => 'grapes',
                          }
              'birds'  => { 
                            'p' => 'parrot',
                            'c' => 'crow'
                          }
             );

print Dumper \%world;
print "Accessing individual elements:\n";
print $world{'fruits'}{'p'}, "\n";
print $world{'birds'}{'c'}, "\n";
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Please refer to perldata and perlintro for starters, to learn about hashes. For multidimensional structures you'll need to read perlreftut, perllol, and perlref. Enjoy! It's good stuff.