Are you seriously criticizing him for using proper typography?

No; I used the word "random" with deliberation.

Could you please elaborate on what parts of the post you think are wrong or misleading?

The idea that the OP needs to read about references right away gives an urgency I think is misleading. The OP's question seems more about Perl's notion of container and value semantics than references.

The idea that a reference can refer to the value of a variable is technically true, but I think that's also misleading, again due to Perl's notion of container and value semantics.

Perl's garbage collection mechanism does not rely on references at the language level. Perl's memory management occurs at the SV level, which is how an RV participates in memory management. That distinction is probably irrelevant at every level for the OP, but getting the details of that backwards seems seriously misleading.

The idea that Perl goes to great lengths to interpret what you mean by references is dangerously misleading; it's true in certain cases of autovivification, but if you look at Perl 5.16 and the mess that is sigilless each, you'll see that taking that idea too far is out of character of the rest of the language. Polymorphic operators are a mistake with smartmatch and they're a mistake with sigilless aggregate operators too; you don't even have typeful semantic operator hints as a reader of the code.

Claiming that the terms "arrayref" and "hashref" refer to nested data structures is misleading. I think sundialsvc didn't intend to claim this, but I admit I don't understand what he was trying to say there.

In reply to Re^4: Array of variables by chromatic
in thread Array of variables by rtteal

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