Re^6: A specific term for a Perlism

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.

Comment on Re^6: A specific term for a Perlism

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Re^7: A specific term for a Perlism by GrandFather (Saint) on Mar 20, 2015 at 03:20 UTC
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	[reply]

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Re^7: A specific term for a Perlism
by GrandFather (Saint) on Mar 20, 2015 at 03:20 UTC

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

[reply]