hi ikegami. dereferencing is literally accessing something at the address pointed by variable value. perl jargon is sigil...however perl does borrow many concepts (like referencing=~pointers nuts and bolts) from C. Maybe it's not the most useful concept (in my mindset) to bring across from C to perl with me...anyhow you can dereference a code reference in perl without the ampersand, so any argument about what ampersand actually does in perl is debatable, unless you actually see some requirement for it in compiled/assembled/running perl code. and it's not in current fashion for perl code afaik. maybe i should re-read the black book..but that's quite dated now.