This meditation was inspired by reading storing and using LoL path: indeed most of us could hardly make sense of the question being asked. After some thought AIUI it boils down to the OP's wanting to store a dereferencing chain (of a complex data structure) as a single "entity" somewhere. Now this is strictly impossible in Perl 5, although there are modules that can provide functionality that will come close to that. OTOH I wonder whether in Perl 6 there is or there could be any provision for such a thing, that is, for a $dereferencer object to "hold", say

<foo>[1]<bar><baz>[3]

[download]

in such a way that

$datastructure.$dereferencer

[download]

would DWIM.

I know I'd better ask this in p6l, but I've not been there for a long time and I prefer to discuss this topic here. Hopefully someone will report it there if judging it worth to end up in that place.

Update: I changed curlies to angular parens above, thanks to the observation by gaal. I knew, but constantly keep thinking in Perl 5...

In reply to [Perl 6] Any provision for a "dereferencing object"? by blazar

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