I think its arguable that mine is closer to what (I see) is the spirit of L~R's original intention. That being to minimize the amount overhead especially that associated with the stack. I thought of using this approach, but decided against on the grounds that it involved an unreasonable amount of copying and stack manipulation. Heh. Whatever. In real life I would just use recursion on this most likely. :-)

Caveats about using is() and 0+$ref in the algorithm of course. Better to use Scalar::Util or parse overload::StrVal(). But you knew that, and its beside the point here isnt it. :-)