According to "Programming Perl 3rd", p 263:

What happens if you try to dereference a value that is not a hard reference? The value is then treated as a symbolic reference.

In the line:

goto &{"greet"};

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"greet" is not a hard reference, so what happens when you try to dereference a value that is not a hard reference, e.g. {"greet"}? According to "Programming Perl", the string is treated as a symbolic reference. As far as I can tell, dereferencing the string "greet" is the very definition of a symbolic reference.

It's my understanding that my code tells perl to look in the symbol table for the name "greet" and return the appropriate part of greet's typeglob: the coderef part. On the other hand, a hard reference points directly at the data in memory so a hard reference doesn't need to access the symbol table to find the data.

In reply to Re^2: symbolic references by 7stud
in thread symbolic references by 7stud

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