In addition to the good comments from the rest of the responses...

I have 42 scalers, named like $a3, $c7 and $g2

... this is always the warning sign.

If you have a "bunch of variables named similarly", that's a clue that you really have related data, and related data belongs in a data structure. Because, nearly always, when you have related data, you want to iterate through it somehow, and you can't do it when it's all in separate variables like that. Not without introducing messy-to-maintain code, anyway.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker
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