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Message: [QUOTE="ccc31807, post: 4872019"] That code is hard read, but it's not obfuscated. The variable 'names' represent scalar values, in this case, an 'integer' used as a key. The convoluation comes from Perl's awkward syntax for multi-level data structures, in this particular case, a hash element that consists of an anonymous hash, thus $sec{$k}{'xlist'} in a foreach loop (which I omitted) like this foreach my $key (keys %sec) { ...$sec{$key}{'xlist'}... } and $fac{$sec{$key}{'id1'}}{'location'} simply references the $sec{$key}{'id1'} element in $fac{KEY}{'location'} This isn't harder than C pointers. And yes, I could have aliased the hash references to more readable variable names, but I wrote the code, I'm reading the code, and I'm maintaining the code ... why should I have to think of a redundant variable name when I have the hash assignments a few lines above this? my %fac; while (<SOME_DATA_SOURCE>) { chomp; my ($id, $site, $location, ... ) = split; $fac{$id} = { id => $id, site => $site, location => $location, ... }; } The script is a short one, about 40 lines of code excluding comments, use statements, etc., and wouldn't give a Perl programmer any problem. CC [/QUOTE]