Hi there Sue! I'm not a core dev, so I don't know the why of not being able to use this syntax. We may be able to patch it so you *can* use that syntax, but it would be a bit of a bother, probably. Perl doesn't really have hard and fast rules about differences between types, so a hash could be seen as a list, and can be assigned from one to the other without the need of any type casting macros: 
$ cat /tmp/foo
my %foo =
('a'   => [ 'A','B' ],
 'b'   => 'B',
 'a b' => 'A B'
);

my @foo = %foo;
my $foo = \@foo;

print( "list: [@foo]\n",
       "listref deref: [@$foo]\n",
     );

__DATA__
list: [a ARRAY(0x1f12d48) a b A B b B]
listref deref: [a ARRAY(0x1f12d48) a b A B b B]

[download]
The @{...} around the reference is an explicit de-reference of the value between the { and }. Say you had "@$foo_bar", is this an attempt to de-reference $foo as an arrayref, followed by the string "_bar"? If so, you're doing it wrong, and it should instead be "@{$foo}_bar" Moo, C.J.

In reply to Re: syntax issue by cjcollier
in thread syntax issue by sueme

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.