The reason is that with numbers you can do this:

my $a = 1;
my $b = $a;
$a++;
$b++;
say $a; # says "2"
say $b; # says "2"

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But if $a and $b are overloaded references to numbers, then they refer to the same object, so you've actually incremented the same object twice. $a and $b are both 3.

Perl forces you to deal with (or at least acknowledge that you've thought about) this problem by in certain circumstances forcing you to provide an overload for "=".

In reply to Re^3: overload conflict between * and *= (as an example) by tobyink
in thread overload conflict between * and *= (as an example) by yogibimbi

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