For the most part, they act the same. Probably the biggest difference I have noticed is that you don't have to worry about dereferencing a reference after the object referred to goes out of scope:

my $ref;
{
    my $var = 5;
    $ref = \$var;
}

# prints 5
print $$ref;

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$,=' ';$\=',';$_=[qw,Just another Perl hacker,];print@$_;

In reply to Re: difference between pointer and referrence in perl by bv
in thread difference between pointer and referrence in perl by sir_com

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