mmmh, I think that I had an interesting idea...

This is a safety kit:

Is iconic, simple and universally understood

So what if instead something like ~> we consider something like [+]>?

We could to teach emacs or vim to print this 3 chars in red so is more readable that other options and thus you can't mistake for a part of a sum, is a red cross in a box, everybody can catch this idea in seconds

If you want SAFE dereference simply add a safety kit "[+]" to your code:

I don't know if this could horribly crash with another internal or external perl structures (don't think that the combo [+]> should be frequently seen in a regex anyways) but looks a simple, elegant, easy to remember and strong concept to me, and not to much ugly to read, specially if we use an editor that can print this 3 characters in red if found before a ">".

What dou you think about it?