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.

You know, 'autovivification' just might be the word that I was thinking of. I had to look up its meaning, and reading it now, I do see that it is an entirely different thing than what I described. I probably once misunderstood what autovivification was and committed my own definition to memory, but I think that is the word I was looking for.

THANKS!

I know that aliasing is not unique to Perl. :) But, I think that the full behavior shown in my example and described in my quoted sentence from Modern Perl is probably unanticipated for most people who are accustomed to other languages.

autovivification is completely unrelated to the aliasing process you asked about. Aliasing is the correct and magical term for what happens to Perl loop variables (but not their C equivalents) and to what happens with @_ elements which are aliases of the parameters passed into a sub.

This is very important and subtle magic and the word "alias" captures exactly what is going on. A large part of the magic is that most of the time you don't need to be aware of it.

Perl is the programming world's equivalent of English

thanks and ++ for the perlglossary hint, never eard about it.

L*

There are no rules, there are no thumbs..
Reinvent the wheel, then learn The Wheel; may be one day you reinvent one of THE WHEELS.