I take your point wrt CODE symrefs, and in fact I upvoted your post. OTOH in my experience I fully agree with the widespread consensus that symrefs in general are bad. Not to say that I do not use them myself when I do want to manipulate the symbol table, but that's a whole different story. In most standard situations in which newbies would (naively) like to use symrefs, real refs would only require a moderate amount of more typing, and if you're under strict, actually less, for you have to say no strict 'refs' then. So, all in all, they should be advised against doing so until they are knowledgeable enough to know when it would be the case.