By "hashing" MidLifeXis means crytopgree-phying your passwords using some algorithm. A similar conceptual-algorithmic method is used in what computer science calls "hash tables" via which perl implements the "hash" datatype in the underlying C code using arrays, since C does not have such a native datatype. But really this is a coincident of nomenclature, and if you have not been asked
to do it, don't, it has nothing to do with perl hash syntax. Do:
use strict;
use warnings;