the reason just plonking in a new value using perls syntax instead of rolling our own funtion is the same reason that you would create any function, so that it becomes adaptable. My original idea was to create something that would record a file hierachy in a hash, probably a bad idea, but in any case it's not something you can do using value declarations, not even symreferencesm, because as someone has said they're anonymous

\$hashref = $%hashref{foobar}

is very wrong yes, because I was getting confused with the making and dereferencing of references at the same time, I know this now after having every perl program that included the above method crashing spectacularly