(On using *, the trick is not to put two in the same paragraph with words between.) You're right, "dereference" was a poor choice of words because it means som

(On using *, the trick is not to put two in the same paragraph with words between.) You're right, "dereference" was a poor choice of words because it means something more specific in Perl. And I think a programmer would need at least a year of experience before they could possibly understand your main paragraph, while PHP was dumbed-down enough to be approachable by amateurs.