Robert found me, and I've replied. For the sake of others who may be interested, the way to subscribe to the vmsperl mailing list is to send any old message to vmsperl-subscribe AT perl DOT org. You'll get a confirmation message with instructions. The list archives are available here:
http://www.nntp.perl.org/group/perl.vmsperlamong other places.
The web pages at
http://www.sidhe.org/vmsperl are woefully out of date. As of a few days ago, the owner of the site granted me access and I'll be doing some updates soonish, I hope.
The CPAN module is in need of porting work to function on VMS. I have not looked deeply into it so I don't know exactly what needs to be done. Installing extensions one-at-a-time can get to be a pain when there are numerous dependencies, but it does work.
Perl includes array and hash data types for "dealing with lists and hashes," and I'm not sure what exactly Robert needs beyond that.
But I'll take a wild guess and assume there is a desire to add persistence of some kind to Perl data structures. Hashes can be tied to permanent storage in a number of different ways. The Tie::File extension included in the core in recent versions of Perl ties the members of a hash to lines in a flat text file. The VMS::IndexedFile extension uses RMS-specific goodness to turn hash lookups into indexed reads. The DBI and related DBD extensions provide relational database access.
Note that there are VMS::System, VMS::Queue, VMS::Device, and VMS::User extensions available providing Perlish access to $GETSYI, $GETQUI, $GETDVI, and $GETJPI respectively. If you know what system service or lexical function calls would give you the settings you need, there may well be a Perl equivalent that would avoid spawning LANCP commands and parsing the output.
Hope this gets you started.
