The symbol table consists of a hierarchy of globs. A glob, short for typeglob, is a structure that has a slot for each variable type supported by Perl (and a few more). By using a glob for each symbol in the symbol table, we can have variable of each type with the same name.

$ftp is expected to be a glob. (Probably so it can be used as a file handle.) 

${*$ftp}{net_ftp_host}

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can also be written as 
$ftp->**->{net_ftp_host}

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which is equivalent to 
$ftp->*{HASH}->{net_ftp_host}

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But it's not equivalent to 

$ftp->{net_ftp_host}   # XXX

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The program is accessing the HASH slot of the glob, which contains a reference to a hash with the object's attributes.

In reply to Re: Dollar Bracket Star ${*...} by ikegami
in thread Dollar Bracket Star ${*...} by snoopyjc

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