Thank you for your clear and complete reply. It illuminates questions I hadn't even realized existed until the advent of this thread.

... I think [the current solution] is the wrong solution because it creates a dichotomy.

It also seems likely to create a few face-plants when people stumble over this little oddity.

If you assign to a non-existent element of an array through a reference, a scalar is autovivified in that place ... And, IMO, a similar thing should happen when non-existent elements of an array are aliased by passing them to a subroutine.

This is certainly the behavior I was expecting, and that I would consider most useful.

Once again, thanks for this enlightening post.

Give a man a fish:  <%-{-{-{-<

In reply to Re^10: What does my @x= (undef)x7; do? by AnomalousMonk
in thread What does my @x= (undef)x7; do? by gepebril69

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