Re: The Concept of References

[DrHyde]

One thing to bear in mind, and which may cause your readers some confusion, is that references are *not* pointers. While it is true that if you stringify a reference:

$a = \100; # $a is a reference to a scalar
print $a;

you get what looks like an address, that is only a convenient way of uniquely representing the thingy that $a refers to. You can't manipulate that string to make it refer to something else like you can in C - that is, you can't do pointer arithmetic.

Sometimes I wish you could.