Do not confuse
variables and
values.
References apply to
values, so you can
reference anonymous arrays, anonymous hashes and
anonymous subroutines. In these cases your request
cannot be fulfilled.
On the other hand, with typeglob assignment, several
variables can be associated to a single value. In this
case, you would have several variable names for the single
value your reference points to.
Further, you can reference an element of an array
$r_array_elem = \$array[1]
instead of the usual
$r_array = \@array
which references the whole array.
In this case, what would your name-retrieving operation
yield?
Note this code was taken verbatim from page 20 of
Advanced Perl Programming (Sriram Srinivasan,
O'Reilly). The first chapter deals with references,
and is very interesting. The only glitch is that it
does not warn sufficiently about the banana skins
you get with symbolic variables. Nevertheless,
this is a good book.
