I'm not familiar with using a "hash array". Where can I learn more? I have all the O'Reilly books on Perl. In your example, how would you retreive the values from the numerous arrays?
Start with perldocperldata, perldsc, and perllol. And look up "hash" in the index and table of contents in your books. Are you familiar with "associative array"? It's the same sort of thing.