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$SUBSCRIPT_SEPARATOR
$SUBSEP
$;

The subscript separator for multidimensional array emulation. If you refer to a hash element as

$foo{$a,$b,$c}

it really means

$foo{join($;, $a, $b, $c)}

But don't put

@foo{$a,$b,$c}	# a slice--note the @

which means

($foo{$a},$foo{$b},$foo{$c})

Default is "\034", the same as SUBSEP in awk. If your keys contain binary data there might not be any safe value for $;. (Mnemonic: comma (the syntactic subscript separator) is a semi-semicolon. Yeah, I know, it's pretty lame, but $, is already taken for something more important.)

Consider using "real" multidimensional arrays as described in perllol.