It would seem like a bug internally for the way the symbol tables are handled. If the symbol tables are creating stuff automatically without checking it would appear to be similar to nested Perl hashes, it just creates something(at least for some things).

my %hash;

print "Ovid exists '" . (exists  $hash{'Ovid'}) . "'\n";
if ($hash{'Ovid'}{'tall'}) { print "Ovid is tall\n" }; # I hate this b
+ehavior!
print "Ovid exists '" . (exists  $hash{'Ovid'}) . "'\n";
[download]

The question would be, is that a bug that should be fixed or something that should be documented?

All of that being said, I don't any answer for your problem Ovid, you have covered any idea I would have come up and a few I did not know about.