Short: It's possible and legal.

It's non best-practice programming for languages like C, C++, etc. where returning pointer to object from the stack is an error. But this is Perl and Perl usually keeps track of the variables in use (ref-counts) and garbage collects them when necessary.
There are edge-cases with cyclic dependencies though (see: weaken in Scalar::Util).

In reply to Re: Reference to a non-primitive (e.g. hash) local function variable is returned to the caller by Perlbotics
in thread Reference to a non-primitive (e.g. hash) local function variable is returned to the caller by o_ganot

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