A coworker and I were trying to work out some of the code when tie'ing a hash to a Berkeley DB file. I noticed that one of the lines called for the return value from a tie() to be assigned to a scalar variable. So I tried assigning a regular old hash - not a reference to a hash - to a scalar. I didn't get what i expected.

I half expected the code to bomb. Instead the assignment evaluated and when I printed the contents of the scalar, I got a weird result. See the code. 

%db = ( one => 1, two => 2, three => 3 );
print %db, "\n";     # prints 'three3one1two2'

$db = %db;
print $db, "\n";     # prints '3/8'

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Anyone have an idea of what's going on here and why I get a fraction when I print the contents of $db?

dsb
This @ISA my( $cool ) %SIG

In reply to Hash to Scalar Assignment Oddity by dsb

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