Question

Since arrays and hashes can only contain scalars in Perl, why do you have to use the $ to tell the interpreter that the value is a scalar when accessing array or hash elements? In other words, assuming you have an array @myarray and a hash %myhash, why do you need to do:

$x = $myarray[1]; $y = $myhash{'foo'}; 

instead of just doing :

$x = myarray[1]; $y = myhash{'foo'}; 

Why are the above ambiguous?

Wouldn’t it be illegal Perl code if it was anything but a $ in that place? For example, aren’t all of the following illegal in Perl?

@var[0]; @var{'key'}; %var[0]; %var{'key'}; 

Answer 1

Slices aren’t illegal:

@slice = @myarray[1, 2, 5]; @slice = @myhash{qw/foo bar baz/}; 

And I suspect that’s part of the reason why you need to specify if you want to get a single value out of the hash/array or not.