A hash is something like an array. Say you have

%foo = (
    'bar' => 'baz',
    'qux' => 'quux',
);
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Then do register(%foo), and now the @_ variable inside register might be like this:

$_[0] = 'bar';
$_[1] = 'baz';
$_[2] = 'qux';
$_[3] = 'quux';
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It's almost like you called it with register('bar' => 'baz', 'qux' => 'quux'). And remember that => is just a comma operator which quotes the left argument, so that's like doing: register('bar', 'baz', 'qux', 'quux').

Note how my assignment to %foo above is like assigning a list ('bar' => 'baz', 'qux' => 'quux') to %foo. So, what happened when you did

my (%error, %FORM) = @_;
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is the elements of array @_ were assigned to %error, where %error gobbles up all the list passed to it because it doesn't know where to stop.

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