It may save you frustration to use Data::Dumper; in particular you might want to look at RE: Data::Dumper (Adam: Sample Usage).

perl -e 'print "How sweet does a rose smell? "; chomp ($n = <STDIN>); 
+$rose = "smells sweet to degree $n"; *other_name = *rose; print "$oth
+er_name\n"'
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