To elaborate on kennethks explanation: If $r{3} wouldn't mean to the perl interpreter that it has to access %r instead of $r, then the third example could have easily been made to work by the designers of the perl language. It could have been another syntactic sugar aka shortform, but that syntax was already booked by direct hash access.

In reply to Re: $x{1}{2} versus $x{1}->{2} by jethro
in thread $x{1}{2} versus $x{1}->{2} by bcrowell2

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