What frozenwithjoy said, but here's a first pass at something like what "... use hashes, but the look-up values themselves are actually variables made up of a scalar and a string of text appended to them ..." might look like:
>perl -wMstrict -le
"my $foo = 'Bar';
;;
my %hash = ( 'BarBaz' => 'Quux' );
;;
print $hash{ $foo . 'Baz' };
"
Quux
Update: Likewise for the OP second paragraph (but a hash might be better here):
>perl -wMstrict -le
"my @ra1 = ( 0, 1, 2, 0, 3, -1);
my @ra2 = qw(eeew ok fine yech great bad);
;;
RA1:
for my $i (0 .. $#ra1) {
next RA1 unless $ra1[$i] > 0;
do_something_with($ra1[$i], $ra2[$i]);
}
;;
sub do_something_with { print qq{$_[0]: '$_[1]'}; }
"
1: 'ok'
2: 'fine'
3: 'great'
