Programming Perl, 4th Edition

C Operators Missing from Perl

Here is what C has that Perl doesn’t:

unary &

The address-of operator. Perl’s \ operator (for taking a reference) fills the same ecological niche, however:

$ref_to_var = \$var;

But Perl references are much safer than C pointers.

unary *

The dereference-address operator. Since Perl doesn’t have addresses, it doesn’t need to dereference addresses. It does have references, though, so Perl’s variable prefix characters serve as dereference operators and indicate type as well: $, @, %, and &. Oddly enough, there actually is a * dereference operator, but since * is the sigil indicating a typeglob, you wouldn’t use it the same way.

(TYPE)

The typecasting operator. Nobody likes to be typecast anyway.