OK, I didn't know how to look up references without knowing they existed! I was doing Google searches for strings like this: '@{$}' & getting nothing back. (Duh!)

I'm still digesting, but it's much clearer now. I guess this proves that I need to keep hitting the proverbial books. It did seem to me that having just scalars, arrays & hashes to store info was very limiting, but I figured there were workarounds. References seem less like workarounds, and more like shortcuts. Very nice! I'm having a great time learning this stuff, thanks a lot GrandFather!