Yes, very good points. In particular, I hadn't thought about there being code that might modify $name. Thank you!

I guess I do focus too much on the details because I'm still at an early stage of learning and I try very hard to understand exactly how everything works, but don't have enough knowledge/imagination to see how the example being demonstrated might be used in real code. Hopefully as I write more real code it'll be easier to understand these things!

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"Abby-somebody. Abby-normal."
—Young Frankenstein