I'm not sure that "pathological" describes this structure because it is one of the good ways in Perl to represent some types of C 2-D structures.

It appears, as it turns out, a less general and more specific Perl structure, a HashOfArray would have been better.

Sorry that I have no specific name in your application for this structure or knowledge of a standard module to convert between various structure types. But as seen in this thread, such a conversion is "not hard".

In reply to Re^5: the annoying keys "key" and "value" by Marshall
in thread the annoying keys "key" and "value" by jabowery

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