When faced with this sort of problem, I've found it useful to just drop back one level of indirection and use subroutine references: 

my $gimme = $fh ? sub { <$fh> } : sub { pop @array };
...
while (defined($x = &$gimme)) {
  ...
}

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In reply to RE: RE: pointing a filehandle at a scalar or array ? by chip
in thread pointing a filehandle at a scalar or array ? by lindex

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