Hi there Sue! I'm not a core dev, so I don't know the why of not being able to use this syntax. We may be able to patch it so you *can* use that syntax, but it would be a bit of a bother, probably. Perl doesn't really have hard and fast rules about differences between types, so a hash could be seen as a list, and can be assigned from one to the other without the need of any type casting macros:

$ cat /tmp/foo
my %foo =
('a'   => [ 'A','B' ],
 'b'   => 'B',
 'a b' => 'A B'
);

my @foo = %foo;
my $foo = \@foo;

print( "list: [@foo]\n",
       "listref deref: [@$foo]\n",
     );

__DATA__
list: [a ARRAY(0x1f12d48) a b A B b B]
listref deref: [a ARRAY(0x1f12d48) a b A B b B]
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The @{...} around the reference is an explicit de-reference of the value between the { and }. Say you had "@$foo_bar", is this an attempt to de-reference $foo as an arrayref, followed by the string "_bar"? If so, you're doing it wrong, and it should instead be "@{$foo}_bar" Moo, C.J.