To clarify just a bit, you can have references that aren't blessed. As merlyn points out, references to hashes and arrays are used to build complex (often nested) data structures. Perl also offers anonymous hashes and arrays, which are references.

blessing a reference essentially makes it an object. In addition to holding and providing access to its data in the normal ways, a blessed reference also can be used to invoke methods that in the package it's been blessed into. If that package also makes use of @ISA inheritence, then you also inherit methods in a pretty standard object oriented sort of model.

In reply to Re: reference versus bless by steves
in thread reference versus bless by arcnon

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