Symbolic Reference not Dereferencing

spacewarp has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I have a strange problem.. I'm trying to use a symbolic reference to refer to a variable's data, but it just isn't working. Everything I've done appears to be straight out of Advanced Perl Programming, Chapter 1, but this:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;
no strict 'refs';

my $A;
my $var;

$A = "YES";
$var = "A";
print "$A\n";
print "$var\n";
print "$$var\n";
[download]

Only produces this:

YES
A
Use of uninitialized value at ./work2.pl line 13.
[download]

Any help would be appreciated, as my deadline looms and my boss fumes. 8)
Spacewarp

DISCLAIMER:
Use of this advanced computing technology does not imply an endorsement
of Western industrial civilization.

Comment on Symbolic Reference not Dereferencing Select or Download Code

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Re: Symbolic Reference not Dereferencing by danger (Priest) on Jun 03, 2002 at 19:02 UTC
You can only symbolically reference package global variables, not lexical variables. Try it with `our $A;` or `use vars '$A';`	[reply] [d/l] [select]
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(jeffa) Re: Symbolic Reference not Dereferencing by jeffa (Bishop) on Jun 03, 2002 at 19:09 UTC
danger is correct - i just wanted to add that you can usually get safer results by using your own hash instead of the package's: `use strict; my %var = ( A => 'YES', ); print $var{A}, "\n";` [download] jeffa L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L-- -R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B-- H---H---H---H---H---H--- (the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Symbolic Reference not Dereferencing by stefp (Vicar) on Jun 03, 2002 at 19:12 UTC
Using symbolic references is usually bad practice. See Avoid Symbolic References and Using A Hash Instead of $$name. -- stefp -- check out TeXmacs wiki	[reply]
Re: Symbolic Reference not Dereferencing by Anonymous Monk on Jun 03, 2002 at 19:04 UTC
DISCLAIMER: Use of this advanced computing technology does not imply an endorsement of Western industrial civilization. I assume you are an Elbonian programmer?	[reply]