This is rather ugly, you have a set of lookups for various values without correlation to structures, while the opening example does have problems of hash abuse with misspelling, I'd MUCH rather see field identifiers as constants and an HoH as a datastructure rather than having unaffiliated fields.

i.e. $records{$person}{$K_AGE}
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That way you keep records grouped. Since Perl doesn't have real structures of any merit, the next logical step is to go to an OO representation and use functions/etc (maybe one of those MethodMaker deals) to prevent accidental typos.

At minimum, the Hash::Util method provides locking while preserving the logical representation of the data (edit: and clean Data::Dumper dumpability!).

Keeping fields seperated without context, IMHO, is the worst thing you can do.

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