Conceptually, a "reference" is a piece of data which refers to another piece of data somewhere else. Let's say that you have a function that takes two arguments. If, say, the second of those arguments is a reference, the subroutine has access to everything that the reference refers-to. A piece of data will not be garbage-collected as long as any references to it exist anywhere.

In reply to Re: Passing array to a subroutine by Anonymous Monk
in thread Passing array to a subroutine by Anonymous Monk

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