In more modern Perls, you have the following syntactic options for dereferencing the hash reference: 
my $lValue = ${$lHashRef}{'a'};
my $lValue = $$lHashRef{'a'};
my $lValue = $lHashRef->{'a'};

[download]

I never use the first of these so cannot comment on that. However, my recollection of the second and third options is that both were available to use last millennium and probably in any version of Perl5. I'm not sure that these are best described as "more modern" these days and think it would be fair to say that use of this syntax would be perfectly valid in any perl likely to be encountered in production today.

All this is just for clarity of course and I fully endorse and agree with the rest of your post.

In reply to Re^2: hash dereferencing issue with perl 5.16.3 by hippo
in thread hash dereferencing issue with perl 5.16.3 by KANAKADANDI

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