Yes, but my question wasn't why Perl have symbol table entries. It was why they are structs with a bunch of pointers to different things: arrays, scalars etc... rather then one pointer to one thing per struct. I came to the conclusion that it was some attempt to gain effeciency... assuming that programmers would actually use that feature (reusing variable names; for ex. $foo, @foo, %foo etc). I don't think that too many people actually do that, am I wrong?