Depending on the type of data you are working with, you might benefit from using PDL. For numerical tasks I have found that it can be very fast and memory efficient.

Update: As requested below, let's say you want a 2D array. You can create a "piddle" (the PDL data structure) with a sequence of arbitraty length and two dimensions as simply as:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use PDL;

my $sequence = pdl [0..20],[0..20];
print "$sequence\n";

***Outputs***
[
 [ 0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20]
 [ 0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20]
]
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