Put differently, you want to prevent transformation of references, but using a completely ineffective tool to achieve it. Making references read-only doesn't prevent transformation.

Preventing transformation (stringification, numification, but not booleanification) of references might be a good idea.

Issues:

• Intentional uses of $ref+0 would have to be replaced by refaddr($ref).
• Intentional uses of "$ref" would have to be replaced.
• Programs that mostly function will start dying instead.

Benefits:

• Catch some bad code (But what code wouldn't already be obviously wrong?)

See also stringification, which allows you to say:

no stringification;
[download]

and forbids

 "$ref"             # stringify
 $ref . "foo"       # concat
 lc $ref
 lcfirst $ref
 uc $ref
 ucfirst $ref
 quotemeta $ref
[download]

noice.

There are only dev releases of the module. If this is something you (the reader) is interested in, perhaps you could contact the author to encourage a proper release or assist with it.

Since making the scalar read-only doesn't prevent transformation (only assignment), there is no backwards compatibility issue relating to transformation.

Hence it's far more likely that legacy code will break if something like $_++ became illegal for an aliased input like 3+4 .

And that's exactly what the change is suppose to prevent. What's the point of making the change if it doesn't prevent exactly what it's suppose to be preventing!

If you say there's no point in preventing $_ = ... when $_ is an unassigned string, then there's no point in preventing it when it's an unassigned reference.

I'm giving up.

I once vowed to avoid diving deeper than Re^10 and here we are! :)

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}