If at all possible you should update to a more recent version of Perl. The language has moved on a long way since that very old version.

Perl's hash data type is fundamental to using Perl well. If you expect to write Perl rather than C (or some other simple language) using Perl then it really will repay the effort many times over to learn about the power of Perl's data types. See perldata and Not Exactly a Hash Tutorial (along with anything else in the Tutorials section that looks interesting). When you have worked your way through that lot come back and take another look at the sample code and ask a few specific questions.

And no, you can't use arrays in place of hashes.