On aliases, I wish Perl had more of 'em. This doesn't really have a lot to do with your meditation, but the topic made it spill out.

I'd like to have lexical variables which are aliases to other values. Currently, you only get that by defining a for loop variable: 

my ($foo,$bar,$baz,$i);
for my $quux ($foo, $bar, $baz) {
    $quux = $i++;
}
print "$foo $bar $baz\n";
__END__
0 1 2

[download]
I think that explicit aliasing which gives value semantics to references would be very desirable. A new alias keyword taking $_ as default argument would allow, for instance, named aliases for subroutine arguments: 
sub wibble {
    return unless @_ > 2;
    my ($string, $position, $count) =
        map { alias } @_;
    # . . .
}

[download]
where you wish to modify the external arguments.

I expect this sort of thing has been discussed before.

After Compline,
Zaxo

In reply to Re: Aliasing bites by Zaxo
in thread Aliasing bites by ambrus

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • 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! —
  • 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:
    & &amp;
    < &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.