You need to use () and not {} when you define the @compass array, like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;
my @compass =
    (
       ["NW", "N", "NE"],
       ["W", "center", "E"],
       ["SW", "S", "SE"]
    );
print Dumper(\@compass);
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