In the OP's defense, there are still plenty of uses for symbolic references. Especially when you're building code that generates functions / classes / packages.

Symbolic refs are notoriously easy to get wrong, but perl's code-generation constructs are only just about adequate, and it's usually a case of either using symbolic refs or eval STRING, and eval STRING is usually just too messy (and slow).

"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"

In reply to Re^2: Variable name by Joost
in thread Variable name by nsteiner

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