Just to add to the meham. Mayham. mmmm.. ham.

In c, a pointer to an array is just a pointer to a part of memory which describes how big your elements are. More importantly, it's to the beginning of the array.

Perl's arrays are funky compared to that. Just like java. A perl array is a struture that has a lot of sugar on it, plus the internal array. What an array reference is, is a pointer to one of these sugar coated structures. You can't point to an internal of it and expect it to work.

As people have shown, you can copy the data, and hell, copy references to the particular data (scalar refs) into a new array.. an anonymous one that is held on by reference.

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Play that funky music white boy..