As was pointed out, your confusion was because assigning a hashref to *foo assigns the hash to %foo.

But the reason that I am responding is to head off a bad habit. Lose the prototypes. They don't do what you think and you almost definitely don't want what they actually do. Prototypes in Perl do argument coercion. They don't prevent any potential mistakes or warn you of anything wrong. They just provide the possibility of minor convenience at the risk of causing serious confusion and introducing unexpected bugs.

In reply to Re: Variable scoping and globs and reference passing to subroutines!!! by tilly
in thread Variable scoping and globs and reference passing to subroutines!!! by MarkovChain

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