Comment by DonHopkins

Please read what I wrote:

>I remember encountering exactly that problem in the late 80's [...]

Tell me what I wrote that was untrue. Perl 5 wasn't released until October 1994.

In Perl 4, symbolic aliases worked via typeglobs, and there was no way to grab the address of a literal, temporary or lexical variable.

And even in Perl 5, references still required complex syntax, had lots of surprising side-effects, edge cases, subtle bugs, multiple forms, context sensitive rules, autovivification hacks, memory overhead and waste, subtle foot guns, and they were pointlessly much more complex and harder to use than references in most other languages.