It also helps to know that &#x27;=&gt;&#x27; is really just syntactic sugar for a comma that also implicitly quotes the word to its left, and not a special operator for hashes. These 2 lines are the same (in Perl 5):<p><pre><code>    %hash = (hello =&gt; &#x27;there&#x27;);
    %hash = (&#x27;hello&#x27;, &#x27;there&#x27;);
</code></pre>
This is also perfectly valid (though non-idiomatic) Perl 5:<p><pre><code>    print Hello =&gt; &#x27; &#x27; =&gt; there =&gt; &quot;\n&quot;;</code></pre>