strictures would help pick up at least some of the problems you are having here.

Using an explicit return would help not only Perl figure out what you are doing, but may help other people (you in 6 months even) figure out what the intended behaviour of the code is.

{} can enclose a block or be a hash reference. Sometimes it's hard to tell which is intended. Perl is a good sport and will take a punt. Sometimes it fails to read your mind. Consider:

use warnings;
use strict;

sub x {
   ('a', 'b', 'c', 'd');
}

sub a {
   { x };
}

sub g {
   return  { x };
}

print a, "\n";
print g, "\n";

[download]

Prints:

abcd
HASH(0x182f30c)

[download]
DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel

In reply to Re: When in a hashreference a subexpresion? by GrandFather
in thread When is a hashreference a subexpresion? by gam3

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.