Interestingly that topic came up on perl-porters a while ago and the conclusion is that it would be possible to make standalone iterator objects for hashes in several ways, but with different costs for different modes of failure. For instance, do you throw an error if the hash gets modified during iteration? or just warn and resume the iteration as best as possible? or not even warn? or (for a performance hit) implement a fully intuitive handling of deletions and insertions?

Several ways are possible right now using XS, without changing any core data structures. But, using the iterator would involve an XS function call, and be less performant than native iteration.

Yeah. I touched on this in my first post. The only thing Perl lacks is the syntactical sugar to make it nice ...which could probably also be added by a module (but it would be a lot more solid if built in).

using the iterator would involve an XS function call

No, that can be optimized away. See Syntax::Feature::Loop and Syntax::Feature::QwComments. Specifically this. (I think were broken by 5.38, but I intend to fix soon.)

It appears Devel::CallParser was broken in 5.37, so that'd be the first place to look. Interesting module...

I think consistency should have the top priority, and for_list should act like other for loops do.

For-loop over an array will silently skip over deleted elements, hence a for-loop over a hash should too. (no tested yet)

If a warning should be activated, then in both cases alike.

update

unfortunately it's NOT consistent

$ cat tst_del.pl
use v5.14;
use experimental "for_list";

my %h;
@h{"a".."d"} = 1..4;

my @a = values %h;

my $once;


$once = 0;
for my $e (@a) {
  splice @a,0,2 unless $once++;
  say "A: $e";
}


$once = 0;
for my ($k,$v) (%h) {
  delete @h{"a".."b"} unless $once++;
  say "H: $k => $v";
}

say "never reached";

$ perl tst_del.pl 
A: 1
A: 3
H: a => 1
H: d => 4
Use of freed value in iteration at tst_del.pl line 22.

$ perl -v

This is perl 5, version 38, subversion 2 (v5.38.2)
[download]

update

tho, according to from perlsyn it's undefined behavior

    If any part of LIST is an array, "foreach" will get very confused 
+if you
    add or remove elements within the loop body, for example with "spl
+ice".
    So don't do that.
[download]

and the demonstrated results are quite unpredictable.

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