Good point. I was getting confused by the Dumper representation: I was worried that if I changed the 'a' coderef, then 'b' and 'c' would point to garbage. (Repeat often: Perl isn't C! Perl Isn't C! Perl isn't C! Hurrah.) The way I understand reference counting, the anon sub will stay around until the last reference to it goes away. The way Dumper printed it, I was incorrectly thinking that the 'a' coderef was somehow "primary", and the 'b' and 'c' refs were somehow subordinate.

As for writing subroutines that don't seem to do much... hey, that's my login name, nop!