Programming PERL in the .NET Environment

References to Various Perl Datatypes

References are pointers. A reference variable stores an address. In this way you can store a pointer to a huge chunk of data and later dereference the pointer to get at the data.

What Is a Reference?

You can think of a Perl reference as a scalar whose value is the address in memory of where a piece of data is stored. The piece of data may be a simple value, such as a string, or it might be more complex, such as a record consisting of a name, an occupation, and a series of elements relating to the occupation. In Perl, a reference is a scalar variable that contains the address of some arbitrarily complex piece of data.

Scalar References

One way to create a reference is by using the \ symbol. You can think of ...