What's the difference between a hash and hash reference in Perl?
I would like to properly understand hashes in Perl. I've had to use Perl intermittently for quite some time and mostly whenever I need to do it, it's mostly related to text processing. And everytime, I have to deal with hashes, it gets messed up. I find the syntax very cryptic for hashes A good explanation of hashes and hash references, their differences, when they are required etc. would be much appreciated. A simple hash is close to an array. Their initializations even look similar. First the array: @last_name = ( "Ward", "Cleaver", "Fred", "Flintstone", "Archie", "Bunker" ); Now let's