It's just as easy to put a lot of things in a hash:

use strict;
use warnings;

my (%hash, $want);

@hash{qw/a b c/} = (1, 2, 3);
$want = 'c';

print $hash{$want};
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or

use strict;
use warnings;

my (%hash, @keys, @vals, $want);

@keys = qw/a b c/;
@vals = (1, 2, 3);

@hash{@keys} = (@vals);
$want = 'c';

print $hash{$want};
[download]