Perl: Dereferencing a hash ref into a scalar? [duplicate]

Question

This question already has answers here:

What do you get if you evaluate a hash in scalar context? (5 answers)

Closed 8 years ago.

Why does dereferencing a hash reference into hash & assigning it to a scalar gives an irrelevant value (at least to me)?

Code:

my $hash = {
        1 => 9,
        2 => 10,
        3 => 11,
        4 => 12,
        5 => 13,
        6 => 14,
        7 => 15,
        8 => 16,
       };

my $dereferenced = %$hash;

print $dereferenced;

Perl version : 5.12.4

OS : Windows 7

The value printed is

7/16

Whether it has something to do with Perl internals?

Answer 1

Scalars cannot contain hashes or arrays, only references to them.

But even if they could, when you use a hash on the right side of a scalar assignment, it is in scalar context, and a hash in scalar context produces false if the hash is empty, or a string describing the bucket usage within the hash if not (e.g. "7/32").