Then one day, the entire concept of pointers clicked. The rest of C was (practically) a breeze to learn after that.

Then came C++, and I had the same sticking-point with regards to references, but I shortly learned that these were just glorified pointers. Particularly in relationship to what was passed to functions and was mutable in those.

Since that point, I've not had a problem with any other language that is "low-level" enough to have access to memory locations directly. Has this helped me for a language like perl? Certainly; while you don't really have direct access to memory, references are very important in achieving fast communication between subroutines. Once you see this, building complex programs is rather simple (though of course there's probably more that people need to tackle from that point in regards to what perl can do).

-----------------------------------------------------
Dr. Michael K. Neylon - mneylon-pm@masemware.com || "You've left the lens cap of your mind on again, Pinky" - The Brain