Hi nhnl,

Welcome to the monastery!

$thing is a hashref. You can read more about perlrefs perlref and perlreftut.

use strict;
use Data::Dumper;

my $a = 5;
my $b = 6;

my $thing = {
    a => $a,
    b => $b,
};

print Dumper($thing) . "\n";
[download]

output is

$VAR1 = {
          'a' => 5,
          'b' => 6
        };
[download]