I received an email from the new maintainer of XML::Dumper, Mike Wong, yesterday (2002-12-09). This bug has been fixed. :) Also, Mike has added more features such as handling circular references, the ability to read and write zlib-compressed XML, and some more (check out the Changes file that ships with the tar ball for more).

[jeffa@trinity perl]$ ./foo.pl
xml output: <perldata>
 <hashref memory_address="0x8108634">
  <item key="a key">a value</item>
  <item key="another key">another value</item>
 </hashref>
</perldata>

jeffa

L-LL-L--L-LL-L--L-LL-L--
-R--R-RR-R--R-RR-R--R-RR
B--B--B--B--B--B--B--B--
H---H---H---H---H---H---
(the triplet paradiddle with high-hat)