I certainly appreciate your point! And it is well taken.

I try to modulate my response to the skill level reflected by the original question (with an imperfect heuristic). Sometimes I am more effective at this than at other times. The HoA (Hash of Array) syntax can often be a bit confusing for beginners. I just avoided this "what heck does push @{$result{$first}}"? mean by not doing that. Anyway, I think the collective "Monk Wisdom" has done well for this OP - there a several alternatives, all of which will probably work out just fine.