Thanks, but that's not my point.

I'm trying to assign a value to an element of a hash, and I want to pass around a hashref. So I really do want to set the foo element of hashref to the value bar. And Perl will let me do that if I predeclare the hashref and then set the value, but I can't do it all in one shot.

I didn't realize that, and spent some time trying to track down the problem -- so now I'd like to understand what part of Perl syntax I misunderstand. Or what black hole I just fell into.