OK I answered my own question based on one of my old writeups. It IS possible to eliminate the temporary variable by coding as follows:

use strict;
my %h; #Pre-declare so it can be referenced inside populating code
%h=(      HELP => sub {print qq(help\n)},
          '?'=>sub{$h{HELP}()},
          SAVE=>sub{print qq(save\n)},
          EXIT=>sub{$h{SAVE}()}  );
 $h{'?'}();
 $h{EXIT}();
[download]

This prints the lines:
help
save