It does indeed seem to be counting down as more use/require etc statements are added or eval'd. In fact, any successful eval will also lower the count. Something as simple as eval('#') lowers the count by one.

The below gives me the highest output count I can get of 2147483604. My guess would be that 2147483647, max val for signed long, is the starting point.

I'm also curious whether this is some real count value or some artifact of Devel::Peek

require Devel::Peek;

Devel::Peek::Dump(undef);

# SV = NULL(0x0) at 0x993788
  # REFCNT = 2147483604
  # FLAGS = (READONLY)

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In reply to Re^2: Dumping undef as a constant produces strange REFCNT by Kc12349
in thread Dumping undef as a constant produces strange REFCNT by Kc12349

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