Actually, filehandles (and dirhandles) are not just scalars. In fact, if you look at the value returned by new FileHandle, you will see that it is a reference to a GLOB.

Because filehandles (and dirhandles) don't have a special syntax, like scalars/arrays/hashes, you have to refer to the entire glob instead. This is why you see code like:

sub myprint {
  my($fh) = @_;

  print $fh "Hello world.\n";
}

myprint \*STDOUT;
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The FileHandle and IO::Handle modules make it more convenient to use arbitrary handles, because they hide the reference-to-glob syntax.