I'm still rather new to Perl, and have been learning it as a requirement for maintaining a program at work. The program is used to load physical survey information (x,y,z coordinates) for seismic lines, allowing the option to write to a file afterwards. Each survey file (SEG-P1 format, for those who might know what this is) may contain data for multiple seismic lines.

My current plan is to store (x,y,z) information in a hash of hashes, and I'm curious if anyone has a better idea for storing these data.

The data model and implementation as I see it look something like this:

Line --+
       |
       +-- Station
       |        |
       |        +---- Easting   (x)
       |        +---- Northing  (y)
       |        +---- Elevation (z)
       |
       +-- Length
       |
       +-- Group (Stn) Interval


%Coord = (
           $Line_1  => {  stn_1 => coord_1,
                          stn_2 => coord_2,
                          stn_3 => coord_3,
                               ...
                               ...
                               ...
                          stn_n => coord_n,
                       },
           $Line_2  => {  stn_1 => coord_1,
                          stn_2 => coord_2,
                          stn_3 => coord_3,
                               ...
                               ...
                               ...
                          stn_n => coord_n,
                       },
           # And so-on to $Line_n
         );
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From what I understand, the coordinates would then be accessed as (for example)

$Easting{$Line}{$Station}
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Does this look like a reasonable model/implementation?

Is there an easier, more efficient way to do this?

I got the idea for the hash of hashes by googling Perl Data Structures, and found the data structures cookbook by Tom Christiansen, which discusses just these topics.