in reply to Odd number of elements in anon hash

For one, you're missing a curly before "SPECIAL".  But I think you rather want 

$simulations[$simulation_index]->{"SPECIAL"} = [ sort {$$a[0] <=> $$b[
+0] } @{$simulations[$simulation_index]->{"SPECIAL"} } ];

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i.e., the anonymous array [ ... ] would correspond to your original \@sorted.

What you have is a reference to a hashref (\{ ... }), where the anonymous hash complains when initialized with an odd number of elements from the sort results.

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Re^2: Odd number of elements in anon hash
by roibrodo (Sexton) on Jun 01, 2010 at 13:32 UTC

    Thanks! I guess I'm not so familiar with the basics of "referencing" (I'm not even sure if that's the right name).

    so, when you use [ ... ] - does it return a reference to the enclosed an array? I think I was taught to use something like \@{...}. Does it mean the curly should be used only for hashes?

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      [ ... ] returns a reference to an anonymous array.

      { ... } returns a reference to an anonymous hash.  In the appropriate syntactic context like assignment, that is.  Curlies are used for various things, for example a block, or to group/disambiguate when dereferencing, like @{ $obj->method_that_returns_an_arrayref() }.

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