Why do you need $ when accessing array and hash elements in Perl?

Question

Since arrays and hashes can only contain scalars in Perl, why do you have to use the $ to tell the interpreter that the value is a scalar when accessing array or hash elemen

Answer 1

Slices aren't illegal:

@slice = @myarray[1, 2, 5];
@slice = @myhash{qw/foo bar baz/};

And I suspect that's part of the reason why you need to specify if you want to get a single value out of the hash/array or not.