Thanks for the reply, and such a detailed one at that.

I guess my real question was somewhat lost in my lenghty description of my recent situation. Really, it was more of a design philosiphy question rather than a Perl question.

To be clearer: [ qw( a b c ) ] (could be) == [ qw( a b c ) ] when you are referencing the reference to the anonymous array back as the reference to the key. Again, I know this isn't possible... and I also realize that the stringified value could be unique (though not guaranteed since it is to be the memory reference address which could be re-used by another object/struct/etc), still not exactly what I was looking for.

Really, I know I can't do this as I really want to. It was a methodology I used when I designed apps in (dare I say it) Java (and a long time ago, when I was a little dumber). I was really hoping to see if anyone else has ran into such a situation, and if so, how did they get around it.

Thanks again for your reply, though; sometimes it's harder to explain a programatic situation in a textfield that I sometimes give myself credit for.