I'm not sure of the techincal/lingual reasons, but I point you at the perlop manpage that states: 
   For constructs that do interpolate, variables beginning
   with ""$"" or ""@"" are interpolated, as are the following
   escape sequences.

[download]

As for printing, I would recommend something like one of the following (I'm assuming the printing is basically for debugging purposes): 
  use Data::Dumper;
  print Dumper \%hash;

  print join ":", %hash;

  print join ":", keys %hash;
  print join ":", values %hash;

  while( my ($k, $v) = each %hash ){
    printf " %s --> %s\n", %k, $v;
  }

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In reply to Re: printing hashes by davidrw
in thread printing hashes by Anonymous Monk

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