I see a problem here, namely that it could lead into a situation where i do my $foo=\@_; print $foo; and it prints @_. I would consider that a Bad Thing, as it blurs the line between references and actual data structures even more so then it already is. If i do "print $foo", i expect to see "ARRAY(0x97ca44)", thus telling me its an array ref. (Ok, i could use ref to do the same thing.. but this is perl. Must be more then one way. If i want to expand the ref, i'll bloody well dereference it.