Quick question: does keeping a reference to an array element or hash value prevent the freeing of the container object when all the "direct" references to it go away? My impression (90% sure) is that the answer is no - elements do not impose "upward reference-counting" to their container (it would be blatantly anti-DWIMish and a severe source of memory leaks) - but I want to be 100% sure. 

# create a reference to an anon array
my $aref = [1..100];
# take a reference to one of its elements
my $elem_ref = \$aref->[50];
# drop the array reference
undef $aref;
# is the anon array still gobbling up memory in a zombie state?

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In reply to Query on refcounting with container objects by calin

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