Fine; where would you find this useful? (Viz, with added value over SCALAR, which up till today I'd have interpreted as "(reference to) a scalar value, which might be a number, a string, or a reference" (inclusive or here).

My problem arises from a seeming inconsistency of the concept "scalar" in Perl. In the guts, there are IVs and NVs and PVs and RVs; but the user just wants his $scalar, with all these possible values conflated. I'd venture to say that this conflation is a widely accepted feature by Perl programmers. Note how another, well-known breach of this generalization — you can't use references as hash keys — is often regarded as suprising (and frustrating) behavior the first time someone encounters it (I think!). Certainly from the user perspective, of the Perl language, it isn't a useful feature, but presumably it makes more sense from the implementation, perl, point of view.

So is ref returning REF on \\"moose" just some leftover hairiness? Or is there a nice hack waiting to be found here?

In reply to Re^6: ref eq "REF" by gaal
in thread ref == "REF" by gaal

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