One difficulty inherent in the design of the Perl language is that there is no mandatory declaration in the syntax of the language of what parameters a function takes, and whether the parameter should be passed by-value or by-reference. The statement $a = 2; can work in several different ways, and exactly how it works is determined at runtime. In traditional languages, the compiler would generate different code depending on how a parameter is to be passed. In Perl, "reference" is a data-type. And there is really nothing to be done about it: that's just how this language works.