The point here is that the essential purpose of the key is that of a pointer, rather thanas data in itself.
There are applications of a Perl hash where one does not even need to use the value, finding all the unique words in a document, for example. I know your right that the key is meant to be the association by which the value is manipulated, but I often use the key to some purpose in my code. I believe it is another form of data and that fact leads to some of the versatility of the data structure.
Take all the CPAN variations, for example. One let's you use a Regular Expression as the key, another let's you set a range the key must fall in and those are just two off the top of my head. That exists to make key data even more useful than it already is, I think, which is very Perlish.
James
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