Are you running exactly that program? What version of Perl? This is what I get: 
$ cat foo2.pl
$foo = 23;
$soft = 'foo';
$hard = \$foo;
print "soft=$$soft, hard=$$hard\n";
$ perl foo2.pl
soft=23, hard=23
$ perl -v

This is perl, v5.10.1 (*) built for i686-cygwin-thread-multi-64int

[download]

In reply to Re^6: RFC: Tutorial: use strict; now what!? by educated_foo
in thread RFC: Tutorial: use strict; now what!? by Xiong

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