That's not surprising at all, because that's exactly what => is supposed to do: autoquote its left hand side if the left hand side is a simple unquoted string.

TEST is a simple unquoted string, hence it gets quoted, and hence, it's not a constant.

Compare: 

    my %h = (time => 0);
    print keys %h;

[download]
That also prints the string time, and not a number.

You could always use +TEST or TEST(), as discussed in the manual page of constant.pm.

Abigail

In reply to Re: Surprising Syntax by Abigail-II
in thread Surprising Syntax by crenz

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