Perl arrays cannot be indexed by strings. If you had #!/usr/bin/perl -w or use warnings;, Perl would have told you so. If you need strings as keys, you need a hash. But you need to know that hash keys are unordered. If you need a hash where the hash keys are in an order specified by you, either use a parallel hash and an array for the keys, or use Tie::IxHash.

If you just want to iterate over the keys and values of a hash, just use the each keyword, but you need to store your data in a hash, still.

my %item;

$item{"A"} = ["dunno", "i think so"];
$item{"B"} = ["okay", "duh"];

foreach $val (keys %item) {
    print "$val => @{ $item{$val}}\n";
}
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