Don't get me wrong. I'm not an FP fascist. But most of the time, temporary values forced on me by the syntax just seems awkward.

Let's go back to this remove-cap function. In a return-value situation, I can use it like this:

my @data = map { RemoveCaps $_ } @input;
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my @data = map { my $x = $_; RemoveCaps $x; $x } @input;
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Just one guy's opinion from someone who's been coding for 30+ years.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

It seems that the author of the question wants symantics that are like chop. People know what chop is going to do to their variable. If the user is well aware of the way the subroutine will work, is it all that bad? Since you would have to do that with chop anyway?

Just one guy making conversation with someone who's been coding for 30+ years (honest). {grin}

--
Casey

Funny you should bring up chop again.

In the classes I teach, the fact that chop acts on its arguments is one of the most difficult things for students to keep straight. I see people writing all the time:

$a = chop $a;
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It's precisely because chop is so different from the rest of Perl that people get it wrong. So I'm not in favor of encouraging people to write more things like chop.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

Ah! Now I see your point. You want to eliminate as much synthetic code as possible. That makes sense.

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Oddly enough, if I followed my own advice in make a new list by substituting an old list, I could rewrite this particular example of an act-on-inputs function as simply:

RemoveCaps $_ for @data = @input;
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Heh. There's more than one way to do it.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker