Question

I am new to Perl and am curious whether @{$list_ref} and @$list_ref are perfectly equivalent.

They seem to be interchangeable, but I am nervous that there is something subtle going on that I may be missing.

Answer 1

Yes, they’re equivalent. You need braces when the expression is more than a simple scalar variable, e.g.,

push @{ $foo{$bar} } => "baz";

For more detail, see the Using References section of the documentation on references. The standard Perl documentation also includes several tutorials on using references:

• Understand References Today (mentioned by hobbs in the question’s comments)
• Manipulating Arrays of Arrays in Perl
• Perl Data Structures Cookbook