You seem to be reinventing fields, and, dare I say it, pseudo-hashes, a now deprecated feature where you could (or still can) use the hash syntax to access fields in an array.

Borrowing your example, the internal structure for pseudo-hashes is:

my $record = [
    { K_AGE => 1, K_NAME => 2 },
    1001,
    'Doraemon'
];
[download]

And you can access it like:

print "Name: '$record->{K_NAME}'  Age: $record->{K_AGE}\n";
[download]

It just works for 5.6.x, still works for 5.8.3 though with a warning, and this feature will be gone from 5.10.0 on. See the docs on fields for more info, including info on what you really should be using instead.

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