The new ability of keys
to take a reference is broken by design. Perl's development team couldn't figure out how it should work with some references, so it only works for some references. As such, keys
's ability to accept a reference is documented to be experimental. Unable to resolve this issue, this "feature" was removed in 5.24. You shouldn't use it since your code will stop working when you upgrade your perl
.
You've hit on of those case where keys
doesn't work when given a reference. Provide a hash or an array instead. In this case, you probably want
keys(%{ $this->{'libraries'}->{$y}->{'cellHash'} })
The whole thing can be written as follows:
if (!keys(%{ $this->{libraries}{$y}{cellHash} })) { ... }
$y='y'; $this->{'libraries'}->{$y}->{'cellHash'} = bless({});
. Note that you must use 5.14 or higher to get the error the OP got. – Vanadium