in reply to Re: A specific term for a Perlism
in thread A specific term for a Perlism

"Alias" and "Aliasing" are descriptive and used perfectly in the Modern Perl example to describe this behavior, but not what I had in mind.

By "fancy" I supposed I meant a large, and overly-complex-sounding single word that represented this specific behavior of auto-aliasing the iterator within a loop to allow in-place modifications of the thing being iterated on.

My memory might be completely wrong on this, maybe no such word exists. I sure can't find it. I just have this memory...of something... and it's been driving me crazy for a week. It's been about 10 years since I've logged into PerlMonks and this has driven me to dig up my password and login to ask! :)

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Re^3: A specific term for a Perlism
by Anonymous Monk on Mar 19, 2015 at 16:34 UTC
    pointer
[reply]

      Thanks, but the word I am looking for is not a synonym for an alias. It encapsulated the full behavior described in the sentence that I quoted from the Modern Perl book (which used an alias to accomplish the end result).

      If nobody comes up with the word I am looking for, I will rest easy in the belief that this word is a figment of my imagination.

[reply]

        I'm with choroba on this. Whenever I see a phrase like "variable x is an alias of variable y", I immediately think that any operation upon x is really an operation upon y. The fanciness is implicit in the term itself, plain as it may be. See 'alias' in perlglossary.

        Updates:

        1. Maybe the big, fancy word you're thinking of is 'autovivification' (see also perlglossary), but that's something else entirely.
        2. And BTW: 'aliasing' (both term and concept) is not a Perlism, i.e., something specific to Perl, it's a basic CS-ish notion.

        Give a man a fish:  <%-(-(-(-<

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