Chapter 4. Introduction to References
References are the basis for complex data structures, object-oriented programming (OOP), and fancy subroutine magic. They're the magic that was added between Perl version 4 and version 5 to make it all possible.
A Perl scalar variable holds a single value. An array holds an ordered list of one or more scalars. A hash holds a collection of scalars as values, keyed by other scalars. Although a scalar can be an arbitrary string, which allows complex data to be encoded into an array or hash, none of the three data types are well suited to complex data interrelationships. This is a job for the reference. Let's look at the importance of references
by starting with an example.
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