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]
[download]

instead of the usual

$r_array = \@array
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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.

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