Rest easy: you're wrong. There is no copy being made.
Update: what the dereferencing is doing is just telling Perl to use the data structure stored in the reference. It's not copying it anywhere.
_____________________________________________________
Jeff
[japhy]Pinyan:
Perl,
regex,
and
perl
hacker, who'd like a
job (NYC-area)
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;