In general, almost all uses of symbolic references would be better implemented as keys in a regular hash. So your question should really be "Why would you ever need to use a *symbolic* referece?"....

-Blake

Not only Dominus has written a good reference tutorial, but he also has written some stuff explaining Why it is stupid to use a variable as a variable name. In other words, think before you use symbolic references. Up to now, I have never encountered a situation where symbolic references cannot be replaced by a hash.

forgive me if i don't have a clue to what i am talking about, but isn't $foo{boo} a symbolic refernce, while $foo->{boo} a hard reference?

Nope, take a look at the following code, especially the third stanza:

#!/usr/bin/perl -wT
use strict;

# hash key lookup using the actual hash (no reference)
my %foo = (bar => 'data');
my $val = $foo{bar};      # fetch the scalar key (hence the '$' infron
+t of foo) from the hash
print "Val  => $val\n";

# hash key lookup using a referent to the hash (hard reference)
my %hash = (bar => 'data2');
my $foo = \%hash;
my $val2 = $foo->{bar};   # can also be written '$$foo{bar}';
print "Val2 => $val2\n";

# using symbolic (soft) references
use vars qw($foo $bar);
$bar = 'data3';
$foo = 'bar';
my $val3;
{
  no strict 'refs';     # 'use strict' won't allow this
  $val3 = $$foo;        # find the data by treating the value of $foo 
+as a var name
}
print "Val3 => $val3\n";

=output
Val  => data
Val2 => data2
Val3 => data3
[download]

-Blake

Nope. A symbolic reference is something like:

$bar = 3;
$foo = 'bar';
$baz = $$foo; # This now sets $baz = $bar, or 3.
[download]

Any other reference is a hard reference. $foo{boo} is a hash-access, not a reference at all.

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