Is it possible to do something clever with regexes within a hash key? E.g., in the following code, it's not possible to access $1, $2, ... from within the curly braces (or the regular braces for an array, though the list of matches returned in a regex is not as potentially useful in an array). The following code isn't obfuscated, but it shows what I would like to be able to do. 
$nerf{"my"} = "fridge";
$nerf{"0"} = "truth";
$nerf{"1"} = "beauty";

@nerf = ('i', 'love', 'cheese');

$_ = 'my funny valentine';


print "print ctxt 1: ", /^(\w*)/, " $&", "\n"; 
# good - this regex returns the 
# match b/c it's a list context

print "print ctxt 2: ", /^\w*/, " $&", "\n"; 
# good - this regex returns a 
# 1 b/c there are no parentheses

$x = $nerf{/^(\w*)/}; 
print "hash ctxt: ", $x, " $&", "\n";
# this regex returns a 1 despite the 
# parentheses because it wants a scalar
# but dammit, i'd like to be able to do regexes 
# within hash keys

$y = $nerf[/^(\w*)/]; 
print "array ctxt: ", $y, " $&", "\n"
# this regex also returns a 1 despite the parentheses

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According to the Sacred Book (p. 209), "One never needs to force evaluation in a list context, because any operation that wants a list already provides a list context to its list arguments for free." But what if one is particularly ornery? Does anyone know a 1-line hack to get around this particular hashkey-regex instance?

In reply to Contexts for regex evaluations by neshura

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