Documented behaviour. From perlfunc, the entry for map:

               "{" starts both hash references and blocks, so
               "map { ..." could be either the start of map BLOCK
               LIST or map EXPR, LIST. Because perl doesn't look
               ahead for the closing "}" it has to take a guess
               at which its dealing with based what it finds just
               after the "{". Usually it gets it right, but if it
               doesn't it won't realize something is wrong until
               it gets to the "}" and encounters the missing (or
               unexpected) comma. The syntax error will be
               reported close to the "}" but you'll need to
               change something near the "{" such as using a
               unary "+" to give perl some help:

                   %hash = map {  "\L$_", 1  } @array  # perl guesses EXPR.  wrong
                   %hash = map { +"\L$_", 1  } @array  # perl guesses BLOCK. right
                   %hash = map { ("\L$_", 1) } @array  # this also works
                   %hash = map {  lc($_), 1  } @array  # as does this.
                   %hash = map +( lc($_), 1 ), @array  # this is EXPR and works!

                   %hash = map  ( lc($_), 1 ), @array  # evaluates to (1, @array)

               or to force an anon hash constructor use "+{"

                  @hashes = map +{ lc($_), 1 }, @array # EXPR, so needs , at end

               and you get list of anonymous hashes each with
               only 1 entry.

amd from perltrap:

       o Parsing
           When perl sees "map {" (or "grep {"), it has to guess
           whether the "{" starts a BLOCK or a hash reference. If
           it guesses wrong, it will report a syntax error near
           the "}" and the missing (or unexpected) comma.

           Use unary "+" before "{" on a hash reference, and
           unary "+" applied to the first thing in a BLOCK (after
           "{"), for perl to guess right all the time. (See "map"
           in perlfunc.)

Abigail