As others have mentioned, psuedohashes were an experiment that didn't pan out, and are been deprecated in perl 5.8 and gone in perl 5.10.

I thought I'd add to what others have shown you here by suggesting that you try out Data::Dumper. It is very helpful when trying to understand datastructures. Try this code:

use Data::Dumper;
my $slice = {
    kind => 'alph',
    prop => 'single',
    item => 5..11,
}
print Dumper $slice;
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While you are looking at perldoc.perl.org, check out perldsc--the data structures cookbook. There's good stuff in there on setting up nested structures.

I also noticed that you use map to iterate over your @item_2 array, but don't use the return value--in other words, you are using map in a void context. Some people think this is a bad idea. Others don't have a problem with it. I don't really care, one way or the other. Anyhow, in case you decide you don't like void map, I'll show a couple of ways to do the same thing without raising that stylistic bugaboo:

# print takes a list of arguments
# here map generates a list of args for one call to print.
print map {
    "num is $num the $_\n"
} @item_2;

# simply replaced map with foreach used as a statement modifier.
print "num is $num the $_\n" 
    foreach @item_2;
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