I like using plain hashes unless necessary. The same goes with arrays, and subroutines. References are extremely useful tools, but using them for everything seems a bit silly.

What are my reasons? Well, one might be overhead. There is a small amount of overhead involved in dereferencing, though to be honest this doesn't concern me that much.

A much more important reason is tidiness. All those arrows do not take long to type, and they don't really make it extremely difficult to read, but they do add some noise. Frankly, I think we should take advantage of any decrease we can get, in terms of visual noise. Consider the following examples:

    @{$href}{"one", "two", "three"}; # hash slice, hashref
    @hash   {"one", "two", "three"}; # hash slice, hash

    for (0 .. $#{$aref}) {} # index iteration, arrayref
    for (0 .. $#array)   {} # index iteration, array

    # with references
    @{$aref2} = map  { $href1->{$_} + 1 }
                sort { $href2->{$a} <=> $href2->{$b} }
                grep /foo/, @{$aref1}[0 .. $#{$aref1}/2];

    # without
    @array2 = map  { $hash1{$_} + 1 }
              sort { $hash2{$a} <=> $hash2{$b} }
              grep /foo/, @array1[0 .. $#array1/2];

[download]

Sure, the versions using references aren't terribly much more difficult to follow than the ones without. It's not that big of a difference, but like I've said before, every little bit helps. This kind of thing adds up quickly to create a mess.

In reply to Re^4: Dynamic variables by revdiablo
in thread Dynamic variables by xspikx

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