Perl has a "leak" with circular references. I sort of boggled at your code for a while since it is rather, *ahem* pathological, but in the end I don't think you made a circular construct. You just made a really deep set of nested hashes. I think the whole thing can unwind from the top. The reference you destroy is the lynchpin and once it is pulled each remaining level can fall one by one.

# These are bad, um-kay?
my $a;
$a = \$a;

my ($b,$c);
($b, $c) = \($c, $b);

my @d;
$d[0]=0;
$d[$_]=\$d[$_-1] for (1..100_000);
$d[0]=\$d[$#d];
[download]

--
$you = new YOU;
honk() if $you->love(perl)

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.