Using "strict" isn't about correct or incorrect but about restricting use of some things that are powerful but error prone. What toolic showed you with the hash is the same thing that the book Programming Perl recomends in the section about 'use strict'. It says that unlike hard references, symbolic references can only refer to global variables and that the hash table way is more efficient, more readable, and less error prone. If you still want to do it you can put no strict "refs"; or use strict qw(vars subs);