Perl Programming/References and Data Structures

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[edit] Introduction

So you've been plodding along with your perl scripts, fiddling with arrays and hashes and suddenly you realize that you would like to pass a function to another function depending on the data you encounter, or perhaps you would like to get back a hash when you look up an array index. References are the thing for you, allowing you to build and pass around ever more complex data structures.

[edit] Referencing and Dereferencing Syntax

my $nightmare = "clowns";
my $ref = \$nightmare;
print "I laugh in the face of " . ${$ref} . "\n";

Output should be I laugh in the face of clowns.

The curly brackets are optional, but generally recommended.