Thanks to all the posters above.

So a new entity gets a new string. That's all fine with me. Suppose $c = $d = new Something. Then $c and $d point to the same memory location and have the same stringification. Everything as expected. The DESTROY will delete the key if the object dies.

Until now it sounds like I can use stringified refs to identify an object. Except for this: is it possible that the stringification changes only by time or by adding/deleting/changing data in the underlying object? The keys wouldn't reliably identify the object anymore.

Assuming this doesn't happen wouldn't that be interesting for certain modules, like CGI.pm? $query->{name} would be $query->param('name') an keys %$query would contain nothing else but param() because extra information that is used by the module's subroutines can be outsourced to a hash with ref-strings as keys. $query would act like a normal hash reference and still be blessed to the modules subroutines. I already see myself experimenting with this alot.

In reply to Re: Re (tilly) 1: What is HASH(0x17653d4) for? by Tetramin
in thread What is HASH(0x17653d4) for? by Tetramin

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