Some old discussion on the same topic. Looks like it's a well-known bug that everyone is too scared to fix :-)

As meryln says in that thread:

an array name is sometimes automatically a reference to that array, even though the language definition would argue otherwise
--
<http://dave.org.uk>

"The first rule of Perl club is you do not talk about Perl club."
-- Chip Salzenberg

In reply to Re: Misunderstanding dereferencing by davorg
in thread Misunderstanding dereferencing by Ovid

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