I point out immediatly that I have NFI about these kind of internals, but I certainly wonder or boggle at the refcount. Now when I execute this code on linux p5.6.1, I get that same value for refcount , 2147483634.

So just for the hell of it, did the same on IRIX , and all the 'autovivified' but empty elements have 2147483566 as their refcount.

This will probably never effect how I code perl in the slightest, but now I just HAVE to know - WTF? , what is this magic number all about? How is it different accross architectures ? (ok that's a bit of a dud question, since most numbers get handled differently) .. but eh!?

submersible_toaster floats off to try and make 2 billion odd references to $i='JAPH';

Update: ++ everyone , nice explanation MarkM.

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