Much of the work you're trying to avoid is done anyway when the braces define a scope. Generally, the idea is to use scoping to get rid of knowledge where it's unneeded. I'd use the second form in question one because $foo is then undefined afterwards. Similarly for question two, get rid of the declaration outside the loop.

If you must, you can make the exterior declaration and then say ($key, $value) = returnsAnArray(); inside the loop. I think the loops would be better written as { my $i = 0; while ($i++ < $a_big_number) { ... }} rather than the C-style for loops you have. You could also say for (0..$a_big_number) { ... }, but that is no way to save memory.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.