(which is what hash lookups are).

That's just wrong. The only thing special about hash look ups are that barewords are special cased to be treated as a string.

sub foo { "test" }
$hash{ foo } = 32; #the literal string "foo" is used as the key
$hash{ foo() } = 45; #the string "test" is used

$x='te';
$y='st';
$hash{ $x$y } = 32; #this is a syntax error, because it's not string i
+nterpolation
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