... a ref to a single scalar ...

My guess about a possible rationale for this is that the strings being handled are in reality very long and DAN0207 wants to avoid making a bunch of copies of these long strings (e.g., to pass to subroutines). In a case like this, I'd agree that taking a reference to a scalar (string) and passing it around could be quite advantageous in the right circumstances. But this is all just guesswork.

Give a man a fish:  <%-{-{-{-<

In reply to Re^3: Case insensitive string comparison (updated x2) by AnomalousMonk
in thread Case insensitive string comparison by DAN0207

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