Are quotes around hash keys a good practice in Perl?

Question

Is it a good idea to quote keys when using a hash in Perl?

I am working on an extremely large legacy Perl code base and trying to adopt a lot of the best practices s

Answer 1

I've wondered about this myself, especially when I found I've made some lapses:

 use constant CONSTANT => 'something';
 ...
 my %hash = ()
 $hash{CONSTANT}          = 'whoops!';  # Not what I intended
 $hash{word-with-hyphens} = 'whoops!';  # wrong again 

What I tend to do now is to apply quotes universally on a per-hash basis if at least one of the literal keys needs them; and use parentheses with constants:

 $hash{CONSTANT()} = 'ugly, but what can you do?';