Okay. Thanks Elian. I can see why I was fooled into thinking it was one per string. If I take an LVALUE ref to one string and save it. Then an LVALUE ref to another string and save it and then print the targets of both, they seem independant. Further investigation after your clarification shows that whilst I can still reference both independantly, only the latter remains a real LVALUE, the former having been converted to a standard scalar containing whatever the LVALUE was pointing at when the second LVALUE is taken.

It's kind of a shame that it works that way, I had hoped to use an array of lvalue refs to acheive efficiencies in fixed record processing. Sort of emulating COBOL style storage overlays. I can see how it would mean major changes to allow this though.