Jeff Clites:But here what I'm copying is the _contents_ of the hash slot.
True, but irrelevant. :)
And here I'm not making a copy, but also the thing I'm taking a reference to is not the same thing I copied above. Here, it's a reference to a hash slot.
No, it isn't. It's a reference to a PMC. The fact that that PMC happens
to be pointed to by a hash key is incidental. It's still just another PMC.
No special case at all.
Oh, I see what you are saying. I was misinterpreting what \$hash{bar} is supposed to do. (I was thinking there was supposed to be some new way to reference a hash slot, such that assigning to the reference [or dereferencing and assigning] would be equivalent to using $hash{bar} as an l-value.)
(But saying something is a PMC doesn't clarify anything--basically everything ends up being a PMC. PerlStrings are PMCs, hashes are PMCs; we have reference PMCs.... If we had a reference-to-a-hash-slot, that would be a PMC also probably. So your original post threw me off track when you referred to "a PMC rather than an immediate value".)
But I get it now--thanks!
JEff
