I wish a good start to the new year to everyone!

I have been reading Damian Conway's Object Oriented Perl book. I have enjoyed it for the most part especially the beginning chapters where I think he does a good job of covering some perl basics. After that, the book is a bit of a struggle probably because I am new to perl and because this book is from 2000 and some of it is definitely out of date. In any case the following code has me perplexed:

sub TIEHANDLE
{
  my ($class, %args) = @_;
  my $handle = gensym();
  my $impl = bless { handle => gensym() }, $class;
  $impl->OPEN (%args);
  return $impl;
}

sub OPEN
{
  my ($impl, %args) = @_;
  open $impl->{handle}, $args{file} or croak "Could not open  '$args{f
+ile}'";
  $impl->{in_filter} = $args{in} || \&_no_filter;
  $impl->{out_filter} = $args{out} || \&_no_filter;
}
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I am confused by something in the subroutine TIEHANDLE. Here is what I think is going on:

The class name ($class) is taken from the list of parameters passed to the subroutine. A hash (%args) is taken from the rest of the parameter list.

Then $handle is assigned to an anonymous glob and therefore becomes a reference to a type glob.

Then $impl is initialized as an object (blessed into the package) referencing an anonymous hash with a key "handle" and value gensym() (creating another reference to a glob).

Then the method OPEN is called using $impl->OPEN (%args)

The $impl object is then returned.

My question is, why do we need the reference "$handle" in the line "my $handle = gensym()"? This reference is not used after this line. In fact a new glob reference is created in the next line in the hash which is blessed. Why do we need $handle at all here? Also I have read the gensym() perldoc and it looks like it is not used anymore although that document is difficult to understand.