Hashes are great for storing named data, but if you want more than one entry for a name, you have to use a list of pairs. Even then, this is really boring to write: @values = ( foo => undef, bar => undef, baz => undef, xyz => { ... }, ); With Data::OptList, you can do this instead: Data::OptList::mkopt([ qw(foo bar baz), xyz => { ... }, ]); This works by assuming that any defined scalar is a name and any reference following a name is its value. WWW: https://metacpan.org/release/Data-OptList