Hi Michelle, welcome.

it appears to be dereferencing an array ...

Just for accurate terminology, you can't dereference an array: you dereference a scalar reference pointing to an array, thereby yielding the array.

LanX has explained why the syntax you have "prints the contents of the hash without looping." But if that's your goal, you might like Data::Dumper. (edit: which he mentioned in his update). This built-in module is used to "dump" the contents of data structures, sometimes into permanent storage, but most often just to see what's in the hash.

use strict; use warnings; use feature 'say';
use Data::Dumper;

my %hash = (
    foo => 'bar',
    baz => 'qux',
);

say 'Hash: ' . Dumper %hash;

## Output:
# Hash: $VAR1 = 'foo';
# $VAR2 = 'bar';
# $VAR3 = 'baz';
# $VAR4 = 'qux';

say 'As hashref: ' . Dumper \%hash;

## Output:
# As hashref:  $VAR1 = {
#                  'foo' => 'bar',
#                  'baz' => 'qux'
#              };
[download]

Then there are various short ways to write a loop, if less typing is your goal (and a worthy goal it is). Here's a simple one, a "postfix for loop":

say "$_ : $hash{ $_ }" for keys %hash;
[download]

Hope this helps!