FWIW, I think there's absolutely nothing wrong with just using Perl data structures as meta-data. If you are comfortable with the syntax, and you're just going to be converting it into Perl data structures anyway, why take the extra step? We use this approach quite commonly, and it's really very handy for things to be defined as structured hashrefs, listrefs, and scalars, especially since Perl is kind enough to let you use barewords to the left of => even with use strict.