I was recently tasked with 'porting' a large body of code from Perl 5.6 to 5.8.x. The following construct (simplified), which was legal in 5.6 is no longer so: 
my %$h = ('name' => 'value', ...); 
... 
print $h->{'name'};

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Was it legal? I can understand my %$h to work as a symref. But then why should $h->{'name'} be correct? Or else does this mean that

my %$h = ('name' => 'value', ...); 
# was "expanded" to
my $h = {'name' => 'value', ...};

[download]

or something like that? If so, then I agree on such behaviour to have been removed, as you declare variables, not variable dereferences that autovivify the reference. That would be too much of a dwimmery, doing what in fact I shouldn't mean.

In reply to Re: Relative Merits of References by blazar
in thread Relative Merits of References by pbeckingham

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