my %identity = qw/name billy state colorado age 21/;
print $identity{name} , "\n",
      $identity{state}, "\n",
      $identity{age}  , "\n";
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If your interest in Perl lasts more than another hour or two, you would really be doing yourself a favor by picking up Learning Perl (the Llama book), published by O'Reilly & Assoc. It's a fantastic resource that will introduce you to Perl's rich syntax, while teaching how to think "the Perlish way".

perlintro might also really be helpful to you at first, and the best part is it's free. ;)

Good luck. Asking questions here in the monastery can be a helpful supplement as you study the other resources.

You might have seen a hash slice. If you have an array of names that look like:

  my @fields = qw( name state age );
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then you could assign all the corresponding fields in the %identity hash with the following assignment:

  @identity{ @fields } = qw( billy colorado 21 );
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Even without the array, it's still a nice technique for making things line up:

  @identity{ qw/ name  state    age / } = 
             qw/ billy colorado 21 /;
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I only use that sort of construct if I'm modifying the existing keys of a hash. When creating a hash, I'd probably make a list with the fat comma:

my %identity = (
  name  => 'billy',
  state => 'colorado',
  age   => 21,
);
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The trailing comma in the list is fine. This is a syntactic nicety that helps you add and remove list pairs in the code without have to worry about getting the last line right (which is probably the most frequent error I make when composing SQL statements).

Note that the fat comma list is not necessary, as shown by davido. Nonetheless, I would be inclined to use whitespace to help the eye line up the pairs.

my %identity = qw/
  name  billy
  state colorado
  age   21
/;
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update: corrected the hash slice syntax to use curly braces instead of parentheses. /me slaps head.

my ($name, $state, $age) = qw/ billy colorado 21 /;
print "$name\n$state\n$age\n";
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my ($name, $state, $age) = ( 'billy', 'colorado', 21 );
print "$name\n$state\n$age\n";
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@test eq ('billy', 'colorado', '21');

my ($name, $state, $age) = (@test);
print "$name\n$state\n$age\n";
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