You are the one claiming things that don't make sense.

In general, passing a ref to a hash that has been created in a sub is much, much more efficient than passing the key/value pairs as a list to the caller. Period.

The case presented by the OP is a bizarre thing.

In reply to Re^7: Using 'keys' on a list by Marshall
in thread Using 'keys' on a list by lammey

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