I find this very surprising. But I checked it and it apparently works.

Why does this give an error:

use strict;
sub dynamic { print "hello\n"; }

my $name = "dynamic";
&$name();
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.. and yet this is ok? (they differ only in the last line)

use strict;
sub dynamic { print "hello\n"; }

my $name = "dynamic";
&{ \&$name }();
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Before seeing this, I would have bet anything that the &{\&{ ... }} operation was absolutely the same as &{...} (barring weird action-at-a-distance caused by tying, overloading, etc). In fact, I'm not sure whether to consider this a bug or not. Indeed, what is \&$name doing other than "using string as a subroutine ref", which is outlawed under strict refs?

Yet a similar idea with other kinds of refs doesn't do this. Both of these examples fail under strict refs (in my mind because @{\@{...}} is unconditionally the same thing as @{...} ):

use strict;
our @dynamic = ("hello\n");

my $name = "dynamic";
print @$name;
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use strict;
our @dynamic = ("hello\n");

my $name = "dynamic";
print @{ \@$name };
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My conclusion is that there is an important distinction between naming a subroutine and invoking it, which is manifested bizarrely by different behaviors in the \&{blah} and &{blah} mechanisms.