I don't know that I'd say it's too far from what it's working on because you dereference a value, not a varaible. Whether it's in $foo or $foo->{bar}->{baz}->{quux} you're still dereferencing the same thing, a single reference. The difference in the two cases is where that value's coming from. I think the conventional wisdom is don't make your data structures deeper than they need to be, and use a temporary if it really bugs you (or if you're using something from way down the "tree" several times in the same scope).