http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=691571


in reply to Explaining Autovivication

autovivication basically means that datastructures are automatically expanded at first use.

For instance, if you've got a hash and access a not previously instantiated element and treat it like a hash reference, a hash reference will be created for you:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w use strict; my %hash = (); $hash{a}->{b} = 1; print $hash{a}->{b};
This means you need to do less explicit typing/instantiating, at the cost of possibly accidentally creating structures that aren't there when you mistype.

Note that perl will still throw an error when you for example treat a hash reference as an array reference, so there's still some checking going on.