Although the hex value is an address, there's no easy way to use it as such, and no way at all using pure Perl (you can't turn a string "ARRAY(0x9458b48)" back into a reference, even if the address is valid). The actual use is that the address is unique, and makes it possible to check that two variables hold a reference to the same array: $ref1 eq $ref2, or $ref1 == $ref2. In the first case, the string including the type and address will be used, and in the second case, only the address is used (but there can't be two different values with different types sharing an address).

In the end, this value should be treated as a random unique id for your references, you can't use it to know which variable was allocated first, you can't use it accross calls to perl to check that you have the same data.

In reply to Re: what do you infer from an array reference? by Eily
in thread what do you infer from an array reference? by purnak

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