note dada interestingly enough, I used something (partly, at least) similar in a [id://332883|recent post of mine]. <p> in my endless quest for Evil Things To Do, I was looking for a way to express this: <code> sub deref { my $ref = shift; return $$ref; } </code> in a more succint way. the first thing, of course, was to get rid of <tt>$ref</tt>, and so I wrote: <code> sub deref { ${$_[0]} } </code> but this is nothing sexy. so I thought, maybe I can get rid of <tt>$ref</tt> while still retaining the <tt>shift</tt>: <code> sub deref { ${shift} } </code> but this doesn't work, and it took me a bit (and the help of [CPAN://B::Deparse]) to understand why. <p> <tt>${shift}</tt> is interpreted by the parser as a way to write <tt>$shift</tt>, and of course it returns nothing. <p> so I realized that the Perl parser <i>needs to be hinted</i> to get <tt>shift</tt> as a keyword, and this can be done in (at least :-) 3 ways: <code> sub deref { ${shift@_} } # too much explicit sub deref { ${+shift} } # supersticious? cfr. Roger sub deref { ${shift;} } </code> the last one I find particularly surprising :-) <p> <div class="pmsig"> <div class="pmsig-14199"> cheers,<br> Aldo <p> King of Laziness, Wizard of Impatience, Lord of Hubris </div></div> 332886 332886