OK, to work correctly, the first element of the array passed to any needs to be false. There are two ways of doing it, I tested both ways, but then I made the mistake of removing both ways from my post. It can be done either as in the update I made in my post above (prepending a 0 to the list passed to any) or by changing the any function as follows: 

sub any (&@) {
    my $code_ref = shift;
    unshift @_, 0;
    reduce { $a or $code_ref->(local $_ = $b) } @_;
}

[download]
Thank you Rolf for your remark.

Update: It could also be done this way, perhaps the best one: 

sub any (&@) {
    my $code_ref = shift;
    reduce { $a or $code_ref->(local $_ = $b) } 0, @_;
}

[download]

In reply to Re^7: Smartmatch alternatives by Laurent_R
in thread Smartmatch alternatives by cavac

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