From: Pavel Smerk <smerk@...>
Date: 2009-07-23T21:55:16+09:00
Subject: How to get real reference to an object?

Assume a big hash and/or a nested structure and the need of a plenty of 
operations on some hash[...][...][...] which is Float. How can one avoid 
the repetitious evaluation of the indices? I have not been able to get a 
"real" reference to that variable to do _something_like_ tmp = 
referenceof(hash[...][...][...]) and work with the value directly 
through the (dereferenced) tmp variable. In Perl I would say

$ perl -e '$x[1][2][3] = 1; $a = \$x[1][2][3]; $$a = 3; print $x[1][2][3]'
3

(where \... is a reference and $ before $a is a dereference).

Morover, why the return value of the assignment is not an l-value? The 
following is legal in Perl ($x ||= 1) *= 2 --- why it is not legal in 
Ruby as well?

Thanks, P.