Another way to compare arbitrary data structures (if you just need to see if they're different, and don't care about CODE or GLOB reference differences internally):

use Storable;
$Storable::canonical = 1;
my compare
{
   Storable::freeze($_[0])
     eq Storable::freeze($_[1])
}
[download]

update:The above gets hashes right (by sorting their keys); however, it doesn't allow ignoring ordering of lists as the original code does.