Yes and no. From what I understand (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong), the memory is freed in the sense that it is returned to Perl, but it is not returned to your system. Once there are no references to a variable, the memory can be overwritten by future variables used in your program, but cannot be used by other programs.
-----Original Message----- From: Freimuth,Robert [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2004 1:25 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: references and freeing memory Hi all, The perlref docs state "Hard references are smart--they keep track of reference counts for you, automatically freeing the thing referred to when its reference count goes to zero." My interpretation of this is that when a reference goes out of scope the memory used by the referent is freed. <snip> -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <http://learn.perl.org/> <http://learn.perl.org/first-response>