I'm not sure that follows. "is the same" for "${s}" & "@{a}" doesn't have to translate into "has to be the same" for "%{h}" does it? Perl has plenty on non-orthoganalities already.

The "sigil{bareword}" syntax is specifically intended to disambiguate those cases where "sigil\w+" would be mis-interpreted

my $a = $year < 1999 ? 'pre-' :'post-';

print "In the context of ${a}millenium treatment of dates, $year becam
+e...";
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Are there any other cases that would need special treatment if "%h" was designated as being equivalent to "@{[ %h ]}" except when used with the format strings for (s)printf where it would be necessary to disambiguate it by using "%s %3d %{h}"? I can't think of any, can you?

I'd say that 15 years of programming in Perl must have given us tons of code that uses %h, and expect it not to be interpolated as a hash. Suddenly changing the meaning of how strings are parsed would break that code.

And it's not just printf formats that use lots of % characters. URIs use % to escape characters as well.

But why make such a fuss? Why argue to break tons of programs just to save a few characters of typing for a not so very useful feature? The difference between "%{hash}" and "@{[%hash]}" is a whopping three characters.

Abigail

It was more a case of wondering why it wasn't done that way, rather than arguing for it's inclusion.

Your point is made and well taken.