Why bother? ...Because in reality I have an object containing a large hash, and I want one of its methods to return a sorted list of its values. More like: 
@sorted = sort { $a->{VAL} <=> $b->{VAL} } keys %bigHash;
return \@sorted;

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Surely it is more efficient to return a reference to that list, as returning the array itself will involve creating a new copy of that array. If I use: 
return [ sort { $a->{VAL} <=> $b->{VAL} } keys %bigHash ];

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Will that duplicate the array, or just return a reference to the extant array? It isn't clear what perl does internally with this stuff. I'm just trying to be efficient, rather than throwing around big arrays willy-nilly.

In reply to Re^2: Reference to sort results by Anonymous Monk
in thread Reference to sort results by Anonymous Monk

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