It's because you've mixed up a hash of hashes with an array of hashes. %people is clearly a hash; but the thing after the = is an array of two hashes. But since, in Perl, hashes are a special kind of array, Perl just took you at your word that you wanted to treat this array as a hash.

The end result is, %people is a hash with one key-value pair: the key is { name => "fred", age => 31, } and the value is { name => "bill", age => 32, }! I know that's not what you wanted, but it's what you told Perl to do!

You'd get the output you want with

my @people = (
    {
        name => "fred",
        age => 31,
    },
    {
        name => "bill",
        age => 32,
    }
);

for (@people) {
    print "$_->{'name'}: $_->{'age'}\n";
}
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By the way, to make your posts easier to read, you can enclose your code with <code> tags!

§ George Sherston