Hard references and symbolic references

Irishboy24 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

Hey Monks, I am a newbie at perl and would like to know the purpose of hard references and symbolic references. i've read a lot of material on this but i dont see the purpose of using references. can anyone explain to me or point me to a document which illustrates why referencing is helpful. thanks Irishboy

Comment on Hard references and symbolic references

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Re: Hard references and symbolic references by kennethk (Abbot) on Oct 01, 2009 at 18:48 UTC
Probably the most straight-forward explanation of the basics of references in Perl (IMHO) is perlreftut. Barring all the applications where you explicitly use references (comparable to pointers in C), references in Perl allow you to have multi-dimensional arrays and complex data structures (perllol,perldsc) as well as use object-oriented methods in Perl (perlboot). But this is all covered in perlreftut. On an unrelated note, the language is Perl. The interpreter is perl.	[reply]
Re: Hard references and symbolic references by ccn (Vicar) on Oct 01, 2009 at 18:47 UTC
If you are asking about references in Perl than look at perlref perlreftut	[reply]
Re: Hard references and symbolic references by Irishboy24 (Sexton) on Oct 01, 2009 at 19:34 UTC
Thanks guys. you have been of great help.	[reply]