I recently ran across an article (http://neilb.org/2016/08/08/quoted-words-arrayref.html) by neilb, advocating for a qa() operator that returns an arrayref instead of a plain array:

our $cars_ref = qa(sedan hatchback coupe);

I love this idea, and I would use it a lot.

I’d like to add onto this proposal another qw()-style operator to quote the keys of a membership hash. I suggest qk() for “quote keys.” So

our %is_color = qk(red blue green);

is the same as

our %is_color = map { $_ => 1 } qw(red blue green);

or

our @colors = qw(red blue green);

our %is_color = map { $_ => 1 } @colors;