accessing hash values with %hash->{foo} ?

I ran across this bizarreness while cleaning up someone else's old
code. A short-but-complete script to demonstrate:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my %hash;
%hash->{alpha} = 'one';
%hash->{beta} = 'two';

print Dumper(\%hash);
__END__

$VAR1 = {
'beta' => 'two',
'alpha' => 'one'
};


Why does this work? I cannot seem to find any reference to this
alternate hash syntax of using the % sigil and an arrow to access the
values of a plain hash. I made cursory examinations of perldata and
perlref, but nothing jumped out at me.

Interestingly, running this through -MO=Deparse gives the following
output:
my %hash;
$hash{'alpha'} = 'one';
$hash{'beta'} = 'two';
print Dumper(\%hash);

which seems to suggest that the interpeter is allowing %hash->{foo} to
be syntactic sugar for $hash{foo}.

Does anyone know of a reason for this, or of a documentation that
mentions it?

(This is perl, v5.6.1 built for sun4-solaris)

Thank you,
Paul Lalli

.

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