Actually I find your comment diminishing towards all those fantastic computer linguistics that have been working so hard to incorporate iterative behaviors into the natural language of Perl.

Excuse me, syntactic sugar is in no way diminishing nor pejorative. It is sweet! I love it! It enables me to write things this or that way as I see fit for the task, conciseness, readability and so on, and it is one of the major strengths of perl.

I have demonstrated that the OPs foreach loop can be rewritten in terms of map and grep, and the internal code path is the same - the very definition of syntactic sugar. Nothing bad about that.

But my major point is: having a working solution means "job done" in the first iteration; improvement can be done into various directions (performance, readability, maintainability, conciseness, exploring grammar, to mention a few) and each has its place and merits.

Hash slicing is sweet - I use it all the time. But in the case of the OP, there's evaluating the sliced hash values at the moment the slice is done involved, so the examples you presented don't fit.

Furthermore, when programming, I am dumb or pretend to be so, because, as the saying goes

Debugging a program is more difficult than writing it in the first place. Therefore, if you write your program as smart as you are, you are, by definition, too dumb to debug it.

I have been clubbed to death by my cow-orkers for using the Highlander List Asserter for populating hashes

my %hash = (
    foo => 'bar',
    (baz => $quux) x!! $quux, # list repitition, see "x" in perlop
);
[download]

and they accused me of writing unreadable code and shunned me as a developer. They insisted in that particular piece to be written as

my %hash = (
    foo => 'bar',
);
if ($quux) {
   $hash{baz} = $quux;
}
[download]

because nobody groks what x!! means. Silly, in my eyes, because once you see that construct, as strange as it may look, and reading the comment and reading perlop, you know what it does and won't forget it. Ah well...