The key to your problem is an appreciation of the power of hashes in Perl. In C++ you may occasionally have used a hash map to allow using a non-integer value to lookup a value in an "associative array". In Perl hashes (hash maps/associative arrays) are fundamental to almost all significant projects. Perl hasn't the richness of types available in C++, but the few that are provided by Perl make up and more in their intrinsic power and richness of operations. Have a good read of perldata, perlref and perllol to get a feel for what can be done.