Thou shalt not use symbolic refs unless thou has a really good reason. Here's why.

One "really good reason" is for playing with the symbol table, which can be great fun and (among other things) makes generating almost-identical accessors and mutators for objects really easy. But for just accessing a variable, don't bother.

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I wanted to explore how Perl's closures can be manipulated, and ended up creating an object system by accident.
-- Schemer

Note: All code is untested, unless otherwise stated