Sorry, didn't mean to get cranky at you specifically. Perl's a huge language, with docs that are less than specific in spots, so lots of folks have an "experiment and find out" mentality that ultimately results in code that breaks.

Just as a for example, if the hashing algorithm made it so that keys came out sorted by the third character, for some bizarre reason, someone would figure that out and use it in production code, which'd break if the hash function changes at some point in the future. (Perl's hashing function has already changed at least once, and it has broken some people's code)

As one of the folks who actually implements perl, and sometimes changes the implementation, what I really hate is the potential that a change to undocumented behaviour can break user code. It's not something we like doing, and we try not to, but there's always that potential, and you're more likely to find bizarre undocumented edge cases just poking around. Hence the grumbly warning--while you may find interesting behaviour while exploring, unless it's backed by documentation you should assume that it may change in a future (or past) release.