The fat comma is just that, a fat comma. It stringifies the argument on its lefthand side if it is a bareword.

Personally, I would use something like:

my $foo = func();
my $hashref = {
    foo => $foo,
    bar => $bar
};
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Thank you for your insights. I ended up writing a wrapper function to force context.

And how did adding a wrapper to force context solve the issue?

Many functions return the empty list or undef as some sort of error condition. Are you sure @values ought to be empty?

The function in question is an accessor to a hash of sorts. It may return no values (=key does not exist) or multiple values.

And how did adding a wrapper to force context solve the issue?

return scalar func(@_); returns $values[0] which is undef in the case of no values which is fine and doesn't maim my hashes.

Why use a wrapper function when Perl already has one?

my $hshref = { foo => scalar(func()), bar => "baz" };
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Or, in this case:

my $hshref = { foo => func()[0], bar => "baz" };
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I am not too certain about your "wrapper" function.

It gives you an undef in case of a missing result, but it will only show the "first" element of the hash, array or list and you will loose the possibility to recognize multiple results.

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James