There are a few reasons.
  1. You're talking about objects. Objects have methods. You cannot use the indirect dereference with methods. So, now you have one syntax for getting values from the object and another to call methods. Much better is to have one syntax for both. (This is why Perl4 uses that indirect dereference and Perl5 uses the arrow. But, Perl5 is backwards compatible ...)
  2. $$object is the syntax for soft references. That is the only way to do soft references. So, whenever I (your doughty maintenance programmer) see that syntax, I start thinking about why you want to have a soft reference there. But, you don't have a soft reference there. You're using cargo-cult programming learned from someone who never made the jump from Perl4 to Perl5. This is confusing. You could have made it clear that there is no soft reference.

    (Soft references are not always bad ... but you shouldn't use them until you know why they are always bad.)

So, it's not a matter of things will necessarily break. In fact, I work on a 250K line system where that syntax is used everywhere. (Lots of legacy code. *shudders*) However, I wouldn't trust it. It's safer to do things the cleaner way.

Update: Fixed mistaken notion re: symbolic references. (Thanks, tye!)

------
We are the carpenters and bricklayers of the Information Age.

Don't go borrowing trouble. For programmers, this means Worry only about what you need to implement.

In reply to Re: That Nit (was Re: Parallel structures are NOT maintainable) by dragonchild
in thread using references as keys in a hash. by habit_forming

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