In perl 4, before there where references, symbolic refereces where needed to make multi-dimintional arrays and hashes.

Now that perl has references there are very few reasons to use these.

our $reference  = "global";
{
    my $reference = "local";
    print "reference equals ${reference}, ";
    print "symbolic reference equals ${'reference'}.\n";
}
print "Here ${reference} and ${'reference'} both come out of the sysbo
+l table.\n";
print "This also shows how local differs from local\n";
{
    local $reference = "local";
    print "reference equals ${reference}, ";
    print "symbolic reference equals ${'reference'}.\n";
}
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I don't know if this makes symbolic references clearer for you, but it did for me. Thanks for the question.