in reply to How does Perl do it it's thing?

If you're interested in perl's data structures, there is also PerlGuts Illustrated which probably won't make sense unless you read it along with perlguts, but adds a lot of details that will be useful if you want to explain (and understand) it in depth.

___ -DA > perl -MPOSIX -e'$ENV{TZ}="US/Eastern";print ctime(10**9)' Sat Sep 8 21:46:40 2001