in reply to anonymous hash

Anonymous hashes are references to hashes that aren't named:

my %normal_hash = ( a => 1, b => 2 ); print $normal_hash{a}; my $hash_ref = \%normal_hash; print $hash_ref->{a}; my $anon_hash = { a => 1, b => 2 }; # note the curly braces print $anon_hash->{a};
See also the perldata and perlref documentation.