This auto-deref seems to be a good thing. C++ compilers could do it, but in C-language school of leaving it up to the programmer to say what they mean, and mean what they say, they won't.

It would seem that under Perl 6, if a hash-type reference is made to what is a hash-ref, then it dereferences automatically, which enables the equivalence:

     my $foo = {};

     $foo{x} = "Bar";     # Auto-dereference
     $foo->{x} = "Bar";   # Manual dereference
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This sort of behaviour already occurs after the variable is resolved, as in:

     $foo->{y}->{z} = "Zoinks";

     print "$foo->{y}{z}"; # Perl5 Auto-dereference
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Under C/C++, there is a huge difference between an object reference, an object pointer, and a stack object. In Perl, though, you could hardly care less where the object is as Perl should be able to figure it out for you.

From a point of style, though, I would have to agree with srawls in that using '.' with hash or list variables is a bit wacky. It makes a lot more sense when used with object references.