I'm not quite sure what you think the uncommenting of use strict is going to show. It's certainly not going to forbid the use of symbolic references! Because that's something that happens at run time, and the code above doesn't compile when turning on strict. You can fix this by using $::ref, $::aaa, etc. Then you will a "useful" message about using scalar references when turning on strict.

However, the example doesn't impress me at all. Without strict, there's nothing dangerous or even strange happening. In fact, Perl is quite doing what people would expect. You'd have to come up with a better example if you want people to get hooked to use strict - this example will just get them hooked to using symbolic references.

Abigail