My key focus in this post was to underscore how much I like to run main() as a “stack” of functions. The independent sub-strata of the code were not my key focuses.

I’ll agree that the “consequent first” if statement is preferable ( I think I had something there in the else condition originally ). You don’t see it in this code, but I use it, a lot.

But I certainly don’t think using $_ is as abhorrent as you make it out to be. If a reader understands the Perl iterators and knows that $_ is automatically set, why not take advantage? Your opinion that this is “not best practice” is in opposition to Joseph Hall’s Effective Perl Programming which encourages the practice.

As far as naming convention goes, they’re a bit wordy and admittedly a bit uninformative, but given the very limited scope of this post their naming wasn’t a huge focus ( there’s only one array with the very primitive source data ) there’s only one HoA, etc.

Giving variables names like ‘data_structure’ and ‘temp_array’ is just wrong. And what is a ‘ray’ in the context of your program? @clustered_contents_ray ??

And using the special variables to refer to input, without ever naming them, is bad practice. I’m talking about your use of things like $[0]->{contents}, where $[0] is never given a name.

Also it’s considered bad practice to use $_ as much as you are. Name your variables.

Also perl5 has some new idioms you should take advantage of. Instead of:

if ( scalar ( @temp_array ) != 3 )
{
print “There was something amiss with entry:n$_”;
exit 1;
}
}
else

You can say:

die “There was something amiss with entry:n$_nn”
unless (@temp_array == 3);

Still very clear. No ‘else’ needed either, if your program is exiting. And give $_ a name.

&function();

is a Perl4 leftover and deprecated in Perl5.