Is this a bug in Perl (nested hash)?

[John R. Comeau]

~sdpm~
I have the following test program to demonstrate a problem I was
having in my code:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl5.005

use strict;

my %hash;

if ($hash{key0})
{
	print "A: true\n";
}
if (exists $hash{key0}{key00})
{
	print "B: true\n";
}
if ($hash{key0})
{
	print "C: true\n";
}

if ($hash{key1})
{
	print "D: true\n";
}
if ($hash{key1}{key10})
{
	print "E: true\n";
}
if ($hash{key1})
{
	print "F: true\n";
}

print "\nKEYS\n", join ("\n", sort keys %hash), "\n";

__END__


Checking for the existence of a nested key like $hash{key0}{key00}
causes $hash{key0} to exist.  Is that the way it's supposed to work?
I would think that merely checking for the existence of
$hash{key0}{key00} would not cause $hash{key0} to exist.

-John
~sdpm~

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