Why are you using a hash in this case? It looks like you are using it where one would use a struct in C. Now, either of two things could be the case: you just have a single hash with this role, or it's one of many. In the first case, you can avoid the hash altogether, and just use variables, $name, $age, etc. If you have more of them, just turn them inside-out. Say you would normally have %person1, %person2, %person3, etc, each with an age, a name, and perhaps more, something like:

    my (%person1, %person2, %person3, ...);
    $person1 {name} = "...";
    $person1 {age}  =  ...;
    $person2 {name} = "...";
    $person2 {aeg}  =  ...;   # Oopsie.
    $person3 {name} = "...";
    $person3 {age}  =  ...;
[download]

Instead of hashes for the entities, and attributes as the keys, make hashes for the attributes, using the entities as attributes - just make sure the entities are unique.

    my (%age, %name);
    my $entitie_count = 0;
    my $person1 = ++ $entitie_count;
    my $person2 = ++ $entitie_count;
    my $person3 = ++ $entitie_count;
    $name {$person1} = "...";
    $age  {$person1} =  ...;
    $name {$person2} = "...";
    $aeg  {$person2} =  ...;  # Compile time error with use strict.
    $name {$person3} = "...";
    $age  {$person3} =  ...;
[download]

Abigail

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