Perls Are A Girl's Best Friends

I believe I am fairly artistic and I tend to spend majority of time in that area. But once in a while, the geek in me does surface. With our company migrating to Oracle, comes the opportunity to learning new tools, the obvious being Oracle/PLSQL. But in addition, using Oracle with Perl. I've bagged on Perl enough. It's about time I buckle down and actually learn Perl.

I came across a Perl puzzle that stumped me yesterday.

So what does this print?

@a = ();
$h{'a'} = 'b';
push @a, %h;
print "@a";

The newbie in me thought it would print b.

WRONG...


so I evaluated each line:

1) @a = (); # Creates an empty array

2) $h{'a'} = 'b'; # huh?

3) push @a, %h; # pushing hash %h into array @a

4) print "@a"; # print array @a


Well, being really new to perl, I had no clue what was $h{'a'} = 'b';

I am assuming, you are adding value 'b' to the anonymous hash that is already initialized with key 'a'.

So $h{'a'} = 'b' is a scalar reference to hash %h and key 'a' and you are assigning 'b' to it??

3) pushes hash @h to array @a

4) print @a will output: a b


I believe the answer is right, but my reasoning could be wrong?

Wow... learning a new programming language is fun. Problem is I have to stop applying the same rule in another language to a new language. #2 stumped me because I'm so used to working with languages that make you declare variable before you use it. Also, I'm not used to notations such as %$@ to designate a variable type.