Your Smalltalk background is showing...

Perl uses reference counting, not true garbage collection. That means that the above, which creates circular references, will create memory leaks. Therefore you should only have the reference go one way.

What I would do is have Team be a class, and then have creating a player, and trading players, be methods of the Team object. The Player object would hold the name of the Team, but no direct reference to it.

I think that does a good job of reflecting your likely usage pattern without creating memory leaks...

UPDATE
Alternate answer. With 5.6 use Devel::WeakRef.

In reply to Re (tilly) 2: The Grouping of Objects by tilly
in thread The Grouping of Objects by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.