Of course, the last proposal is seen to be as a joke, because real fun will start as soon as you lazily name a file handle P and try to read/write with it.

Is that a problem ?? Subs (via use constant) and filehandles have different slots in the symboltable AFAIK.

Since P, N and I do not need to be interpolated I prefer using ' instead of " with reference to your second alternative.

Nice post though++