Jep, here is something strange going on. let's send the following to the debugger:

use vars qw/%x/;

$x{test} = "very ";
$x{test}{this} = "strange";

print $x{test};
print $x{test}{this};

[download]

the second asignment causes %x not to be changed in any way. But if you make a 'V' after it, you'll see a new hash called 'very' as a symbol available with key 'this' and value 'strange'. So what's actually happening is kind of autovivified symbolic hash-refence assignment. I suppose the docs explain it somewhere but ...

Anyway: your coworker is affecting the symbol table and that is dangerous for the code. What happens if:

$x{test} = 'ENV';
$x{test}{important_key} = 'bad value';

[download]

Yes, it clobbers the environmental variable!

--
http://fruiture.de

In reply to Re: bareword and hash reference by fruiture
in thread bareword and hash reference by mce

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.