Arturo mentioned I should give a context for this, so here it is. I'm allowing users of this module-set I'm writing to pass me stuff either as a blah or a ref to blah. So, I need to determine if it's a ref or not, and what kind of ref is it. Here's the code I've got: (Other comments on the code are welcome!)

sub coerce_args {
    my $self = shift;
    my $type = shift;
  
    local $_;

    # This is needed to guarantee that $type is a string that can be
    # compared.
    return @_ if !defined $type || $type eq '' || $type =~ /\d/;

    if ($type eq 'ARRAY') {
#        if ($_[0]->isa($type)) {
        if (ref($_[0]) eq $type) {
            return @{$_[0]};
        } else {
            return @_;
        }
    } elsif ($type eq 'HASH') {
#        if ($_[0]->isa($type)) {
        if (ref($_[0]) eq $type) {
            return %{$_[0]};
        } else {
            return @_;
        }
    } elsif ($type eq 'SCALAR') {
#        if ($_[0]->isa($type)) {
        if (ref($_[0]) eq $type) {
            return ${$_[0]};
        } else {
            return $_[0];
        }
#GGG This one is a little confusing...
#    } elsif ($type eq 'NONE') {
#        return @_;
    } else {
        return @_;
        # Unknown $type?? Maybe this is for objects?
    }
}
[download]