hmh ... seems not to work, if the dumped ref is a lexical variable in production-code. For the moment I live with this solution - not very elegant, because most of the time the identifying string will be same as the var-name:

say sdump($pout, '$pout');

sub sdump {
    my $ref = shift || croak('nothing to dump - missing ref');
    my $name = shift || 'n/a';
    my $depth = shift || 2;
    local $Data::Dumper::Maxdepth = $depth;
    return "Dump of $name:\n" . Dumper($ref);
}
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Any idea, how to call it this way?

sdump('$pout');
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