FWIW, that was one of the things that Larry fixed in Perl 6 (now the Raku Programming Language https://raku.org https://raku.org #rakulang). You can bind to a

FWIW, that was one of the things that Larry fixed in Perl 6 (now the Raku Programming Language https://raku.org https://raku.org #rakulang). You can bind to a non-existing hash element (even multiple levels deep) and it won't exist until you actually assign to it: my %h; my $c := %h<a><b><c>; say %h<a>:exists; # False $c = 42; say %h<a>:exists; # True