I was looking at http://www.python.org/moin/PerlPhrasebook section
2.1.1,
and was re-aquainted with a quote attributed to Larry Wall:
"... You can program in a Pythonesque subset of Perl by restricting
yourself
to scalar variables and references. The main difference is that Perl
doesn't
do implicit dereferencing like Python does."
You *don't* get closer to Python by restricting yourself to scalers
holding references. Anyone who knows Perl but not Python would get
totally the wrong idea by contemplating the quote.
Cheers, Paddy.