I think that construct is still legal in Perl 5.8.x but you may be falling foul of
use strict;. I may be wrong but I suspect that your
$h contains a string which is the name of another variable thus setting up a soft reference. The following have been run under Perl 5.8.4
Firstly with no use strict; or use warnings;
#use strict;
#use warnings;
$h = "fred";
%$h = (name => "Jim", age => 34);
print $h->{name}, "\n";
print $fred{age}, "\n";
produces
Jim
34
Switching on strict like this
use strict;
use warnings;
our %fred;
my $h = "fred";
%$h = (name => "Jim", age => 34);
print $h->{name}, "\n";
print $fred{age}, "\n";
produces
Can't use string ("fred") as a HASH ref while "strict refs" in use at
+pbeck2 line 8.
because use strict; objects to soft references. Only by switching strict off for the duration of a code block can you use soft references.
use strict;
use warnings;
our %fred;
my $h = "fred";
{
no strict q(refs);
%$h = (name => "Jim", age => 34);
print $h->{name}, "\n";
}
print $fred{age}, "\n";
produces
Jim
34
I hope this clarifies what might be happening with your "illegal" code.
Cheers,
JohnGG
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