It's a Perl 4 relic in a shiny new Perl 5.6 world. (As Perl 5 came out in 1994, well, there's not much excuse to do things this way.)

What would be better is returning a reference to a hash from getSlashConf(). That code might look something like this:

my $l = getSlashConf();
getSlash();
my $op = $l->{F}{op};
[download]

In getSlashConf(), that last line should probably change to: return $l{HASH}; In my opinion, this makes it more clear that we are dealing with a hash of hashes data structure. (All that means is that the value of a hash is actually a reference to another hash, instead of a scalar.)

For more information on references, see perlman:perlref. For more information on complex data structures, see perlman:perldsc.