In the years since I've written this, UNIVERSAL::isa has been written. Use that instead.

You might consider something along the lines of this explode() function. It finds the lowest level values and returns that as a list. This probably doesn't get to exactly what you want but its a starter idea for you anyway.

use UNIVERSAL 'isa';

sub explode {
    map ref $_ ? explode( isa( $_, 'HASH' )   ? keys %$_ :
                          isa( $_, 'ARRAY' )  ? @$_      :
                          isa( $_, 'CODE' )   ? $_->()   :
                          isa( $_, 'SCALAR' ) ? $$_      :
                          isa( $_, 'REF' )    ? $$_      :
                          $_ ) :
        $_,
    @_;
}
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