[Ma-linux] perl hash construction

[Przemek Klosowski]

this has got to be a common Perl use case, but I can't think of a 
compact, Perlish way of writing it. I am reading tabular data into a 
Perl hash---I want to refer to the data by the field names:

date temp humidity
Mon   75  40
Tue   80  35
Wed   65  55

so I am writing

my $data;
while (<>) {
   ($date,$temp,$humidity) = split;
   $data->{'date'}=$date;
   $data->{'temp'}=$temp;
   $data->{'humidity'}=$humidity;

   # make a hash of hashes, indexed by date, returning the entire record
   $record{$date}=$data;
}

Isn't there a way to assign the temporary hash more succintly?

while (<>) {
   $data = ...???... ('date','temp','humidity'), split;

   # make a hash of hashes, indexed by date, returning the entire record
   $record{$data->{'date'}}=$data;
}