I think our Anony Monk was thinking about multi-dimentinal hashes:

my %a = (
   foo => { }, 
   bar => { }, 
);
if($a{baz}{key}) { }
[download]

In this case, 'baz' is created in the first dimention. Since we're dealing with a single-dimentional hash, our Anony Monk was incorrect.

----
I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
-- Schemer

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated