Unfortunately fat comma is only going half way to be a hash separator (which is the normal use case) and there are already many use cases exploiting list context for syntactic sugar.

See for instance Re^4: Stop Using Perl and further discussion

Anyway some remarks:

• you should have returned undef in your function, since it was never intended to be used in list context and a call in scalar context would always result to undef anyway.
• you could have checked wantarray otherwise
• prepending scalar is the normal idiomatic way to force scalar context (sic)
• personally I would have chosen "" . call() to get am explicit string
• your use of each and keys is a bit worrying, because it's globally resetting the iterator of that hash °

update

°) a simple ($key) = %$hash_ref would have done the trick better

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