It might have gone by you - JavaFan's question was more rhetorical, as the differences in output of the following code show you:

use strict;

my $rowRef = {
    foo => 'foo value',
    bar => 'bar value',
};

my $rowName = 'bar';
for my $rn ($rowName, '$rowName') {
    my $rowValue;
    if (exists $rowRef->{$rn}) {
        $rowValue = $rowRef->{$rn}
    } else {
        $rowValue = '<does not exist>';
    };
    print "rowRef for '$rn' is '$rowValue'\n";
};
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OK, pick on the newbie :-) I was using it without quotes, but then I decided to try it with quotes (I use those for Perl-embedded MySQL code), and that's what I copied and pasted. In any case, even without the quotes, it still does not work.

Of course not, elsf isn't perl ;->)

Then you are misinterpreting the error message. For example,

>perl -e"while ($x) {  if ($y) { } } elsif ($z) { } }"
syntax error at -e line 1, near "} elsif"
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.

>perl -e"while ($x) {  if ($y) { } elsif ($z) { } }"

>
[download]

Replacing elsif with random words is not a suitable bug fix.