That's better. (And aliasing a slice is a nice twist on the theme.) But the OP wanted to be able to use simple scalars. Here's a modification that will do the trick: 

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
use vars qw( $alias );

sub alias_to { \$_[0] }

my @array = qw( foo bar baz );
*alias = alias_to( $array[1] );

print "alias: $alias\n";

$alias = 'QUUX';
print "array: @array\n";

[download]
It's really nothing more than a convenience function to do exactly the same thing as I suggested in my original answer in this thread. Looking at it, I'm not even sure it's that convenient. I think *alias = \$array[1]; is perfectly clear, and it doesn't require me to go check what the alias_to() sub actually does. 

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Re: use simple scalar names to point to specific array elements by sauoq
in thread use simple scalar names to point to specific array elements by Sandy

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