Perl uses a reference-counting garbage collection scheme. Declaring the lexical increments the reference counter to one, and storing a reference in the object increments the counter to two. When the @array name goes out of scope, the counter is decremented back to one. Since the object still holds a reference, the actual array data structure will not be garbage collected.

In reply to Re: Storing arrays as object variables by chromatic
in thread Storing arrays as object variables by Basilides

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