Your intent is not clear. What do you mean by “returning a hash”? You can't do that, per se. Did you mean to return a hash ref or a list of key/value pairs that can be assigned to a hash?

In either case the hash slice is a red herring. Quoth perlop under Assignment Operators:

[…] a list assignment in list context produces the list of lvalues assigned to, […]

which matches the exact behaviour you described.

If you want to return a hash ref you're going about this wrong. That code would be

sub build_hash {
    my %return;
    @return{@keys} = @values;
    \%return;
}

[download]

Returning a list of key/value pairs requires more list-fu:

sub build_hash {
    ( @keys, @_ )[ map { $_, $_ + @keys } 0 .. $#keys ];
}

[download]

Makeshifts last the longest.

In reply to Re: hash slice ? No thanks, I'm about to return... by Aristotle
in thread hash slice ? No thanks, I'm about to return... by leriksen

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