So, I'm learning Perl. I quite like it, but it sure has some crazy things. So, I've tried to find the answer on the internets and came up with nothing... Why does Perl have typeglobs? Yes, I understand that they are symbol table entries, but why can they hold several completely unrelated things - scalars, arrays, filehandles? Is there some technical reason for that? Or was that just Larry's idea? The closest thing to an explanation that I could find was actually in an old book 'Advanced Perl Programming', and the author simply said 'I have no explanation for that feature'. So, yeah, why are typeglobs the way they are?