in reply to My very confusing questions

You are confused because of things that implied in Perl.

Let's back up. You are treating your hash of subroutines like an array of subroutine references. Do you mean to do the following?

my %h = ( func1 => sub { return sprintf ("0x%x", shift) }, func2 => sub { return sprintf ("%b", shift) }, func3 => sub { return sprintf ("%d", shift) }, );
You Then would selectively call the sub you want using using the subroutine reference invocation idiom,
$h{func1}->();

Assuming you do, then the shift operates on @_ - this is the implicit parameters list. For clarity, it is recommended that you unpack parameters, for example:

my %h = ( func1 => sub { my $value = shift @_; return sprintf ("0x%x", $value) }, func2 => sub { my $value = shift @_; return sprintf ("%b", $value); }, func3 => sub { my $value = shift @_; return sprintf ("%d", $value); }, );
More about shift and why it's used inside of subroutines to unpack parameters:

But of course, TIMTOWTDI. Some examples:

Pass in some number of key/value pairs as a simple list

sub foo { # requires an even number of parameters in @_ my %params = @_; return; } # to call: foo(qw/key1 val1 key2 val2 key3 val3/);
As a singular hash reference with some number of key/value pairs already defined
sub foo { # get singular hash reference with any number of key/value pairs my $params = shift @_; # or alternatively, my $params = $_[0] # some may want to dereference (I usually don't) my %params = %$params; return; } # to call: foo( {'key1' => 'val1', 'key2' => 'val2', 'key3' => 'val3' }); # or without braces, foo( 'key1' => 'val1', 'key2' => 'val2', 'key3' => 'val3' );
I HTH.