Now when did they change that? More importantly I would like to know why.

For the record the version that I pulled from is 5.005_03, and it is merlyn's version as well as you can see if you look at what he quoted Re: Re: Re: Hash slices ?.

Anyways I also see a brand spanking new section on slices (which is probably why it was pulled) that does not document this case (which should be fixed). As of 5.6.0 (I don't have 5.6.1, so someone should look and send in a patch) it had a typo, an attempt to swap the first and last terms of @folks was messed up when they tried to write it without a slice.

So it used to be determinable from the documentation with 5.005_03 (which is hardly, given the problems with 5.6.0, a horribly outdated release to be still running) but is now not. In the old version the relevant snippet was what merlyn posted.