I've been under the impression that an object is just a reference, and I thought that printing a reference would have given me something like "HASH0xbf43" rather than the value I was expecting

That won't be the case if double quotes have been overloaded for that (blessed) object. 
perl -MMath::BigInt -le 'print Math::BigInt->new(123)'

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For example, it's that overloading that causes the above one liner to output 123 instead of Math::BigInt=HASH(0x210fe54)

Otoh, Devel::Peek::Dump(), in addition to providing more detail, is also a *reliable* way of seeing what the scalar actually is.

Cheers,
Rob

In reply to Re^5: Getting different results with $var++ and $var += 1 by syphilis
in thread Getting different results with $var++ and $var += 1 by splicer

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