Thank you all for useful links and answers, I should have done better research to at least find ref to read-only alias ... why?, which itself links far further into the past. Still not sure how to justify why with foo(1+1) the $_[0] is OK to be writeable, but with foo(1) it should die. Following previous discussion, the impression now is that it's either not a bug but vague (because of dynamic language(?)) area, or bug of very low priority, fixing of which can break/slower existing code (?).

As to from where I started (foo(pack 'P', $data)), with hindsight, of course $_[0] is "pointable" for as long as staying within a sub, and returning that pointer to outside is entirely programmer's (my) fault, Perl couldn't help :(