Even with jeffa's notes below, it still took me a while to wrap this around my brain but when I had, I came up with this....

my @array = qw /a b c d e f/;
my $hash;
my $val = 1;
($hash->{pop @array}, $val, $hash) = ($val, $hash, undef) while @array
+;
$hash = $val;
[download]

Which is slightly cleaner?, but that final assignment stood out so...

my @array = qw /a b c d e f/;
my $hash = 1;
my $tmp;

($tmp->{pop @array}, $hash, $tmp) = ($hash, $tmp, undef)  while @array
+;
[download]

Slightly non-intuative to assign the value to the hashref at the start but...