You can think of map as a function that takes a sub and an array as arguments. It then calls the sub for every element of the array. It accumulates the values returned from all of those function calls and returns them as a list.

To fill the hash by assigning to it, you need to have a list that consists of key/value pairs - which you were obtainig before via split. You can do the same thing:

  my %hash = map { split /:/; } @array;
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Split will break each element of @array into a key/value pair (just like your code does), and map will accumulate them into a list, then you assign the list to the hash.

Is that what you were after?