There really is no reason to get at the address from perl. In fact both your examples are completely useless, but I assume that's because they're examples :-) If you want to interface with C code at this low level, you're better off using XS, or Inline::C.

Note that a perl scalar variable is a much more complex data structure than a C string, but both XS and Inline::C can make the conversion (almost) transparant.

updated: corrected typo