[ecef9-8c0f-4374]

There was an experimental auto-deref feature since Perl 5.14 And it's already gone again since 5.24.

[chromatic]

That's because it didn't work reliably. There were at least a couple of situations where Perl would have had to guess which operation you were trying to perform, so the feature was a source of potential bugs.

[ecef9-8c0f-4374]

Hi. I really liked your book Modern Perl. Yes unfortunately auto-deref had problems.