You might have seen a hash slice. If you have an array of names that look like:

  my @fields = qw( name state age );
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then you could assign all the corresponding fields in the %identity hash with the following assignment:

  @identity{ @fields } = qw( billy colorado 21 );
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Even without the array, it's still a nice technique for making things line up:

  @identity{ qw/ name  state    age / } = 
             qw/ billy colorado 21 /;
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I only use that sort of construct if I'm modifying the existing keys of a hash. When creating a hash, I'd probably make a list with the fat comma:

my %identity = (
  name  => 'billy',
  state => 'colorado',
  age   => 21,
);
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The trailing comma in the list is fine. This is a syntactic nicety that helps you add and remove list pairs in the code without have to worry about getting the last line right (which is probably the most frequent error I make when composing SQL statements).

Note that the fat comma list is not necessary, as shown by davido. Nonetheless, I would be inclined to use whitespace to help the eye line up the pairs.

my %identity = qw/
  name  billy
  state colorado
  age   21
/;
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update: corrected the hash slice syntax to use curly braces instead of parentheses. /me slaps head.