I have to say I come from C and back then (yes! Then) without goofle and the free literature it was a lot of hard work to conquer the pointers. I can't let it go now. I have often debated internally whether thinking in C while writing Perl was a good habit/idea/practice. It is NOT. But when %$^$& comes to shovel I have to think of some ways to make it faster. Because I am too lazy to program it in C eventually. And these are some of the tricks I pull.
That's why my subs most of the times have a hashref of params as input (as opposed to array-style (file => 'aaa' , action => 'delete')) and I always return a hashref or arrayref or object back, but never ever an array. I think somewhere an angel dies when I do that. Cargo-culting perhaps, plus I am not a natural Perl-er.
bw, bliako