note fergal Depends on what you mean by "right". I get <code> $VAR1 = [ \1, { 'key' => ${$VAR1->[0]} } ]; </code> which can't be evaluated correctly by Perl's eval but it does contain all the necessary information. A human can see what's going on and it's probably possible to write something that would reconstruct the correct sturucture but it would involve some sort of constraint solver. <p>Purity just controls whether it should be compatible with eval(). Even with Purity=0, this information should be preserved otherwise certain structures would have identical output even though they're not identical. <p>Deepcopy controls whether we care about cross references so it definitely should be dropped when you have Deepcopy=1. 433537 433705