Just for completeness' sake (as the others here said, it is propably not a good idea to use this 'feature'):

a quote from "Object Oriented Perl" by Damian Conway:

--- <quote>

<quote> You can add new entries to a pseudo-hash, but it's a two step procedure. First, you add a new key-to-index mapping: 
$pseudo_hash->[0]->{"z"} = @{$pseudo_hash};

[download]
which maps the key "z" onto the first unused index in the pseudo-hash array. After that, you can access the new entry directly, to assign it a value: 
$pseudo_hash->{"z"} = "value z";

[download]
</quote> ---- </quote>

which would translate to something like this in your example: 
my $a = [ {first=>1, second=>2}, "hello", "there" ];
print "$a->{first}\t$a->{second}\n";

$a->[0]->{'third'} = @{$a};
$a->{'third'} = "foo";
print "$a->{first}\t$a->{second}\t$a->{third}\n";

[download]

---- kurt

In reply to Re: making arrays that act like hashes at runtime by amphiplex
in thread making arrays that act like hashes at runtime by dinesh

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