Aaron Priven wrote: >Then whatever you had in $foo, it could be dereferenced, into whatever >it is -- scalar, hash, array, glob, etc. There's no ambiguity there, >is there? There are two kinds of ambiguity that that would cause. Firstly, overloading of operators @{}, %{}, et al, mean that a single reference can indeed be dereferenced in multiple ways. Secondly, the semantics of several operators depends on *compile-time* knowledge of the type of an operand, but your proposed dereference-to-anything operator means that the resulting type isn't known until runtime. A dereference-to-any operand either (sane version) would not be eligible for use with operators requiring an array/hash/whatever, or (insane version) would require many new op types to be added that defer to runtime the decisions that are currently made at compile time. It's all the same problem we ran into with auto-dereferencing "keys $r". -zeframThread Previous | Thread Next