yes you are right, $name = shift should do no aliasing automatically, Perl needs universal scalars which are untyped.

see also my other replies, discussing typed my $name[] = ... declarations to be able to pass/assign references which work without -> operator.

• Re^2: Unifying namespaces of @name and $name to simplify dereferencing?
• Re^2: Unifying namespaces of @name and $name... (bare lexicals)

update

> No. The name passed in (update: in normal behavior, obviously) is a string, the $name{...} lookup is into a previously defined hash:

yes and in feature "autoref" this should never compile!

Because of the alias $name = \%name in the upper scope a redeclaration of a simple scalar $name in the sub would make $name{...} accessing an undefined variable.

I.o.W. identifiers must be unique in any scope and you would achieve this compile time checking without needing to use Perl Critic.