But I think adjusting the one assign through would be easy and useful.
This is changed in bleadperl and will be in 5.10. In 5.8.x at some point a grammatically torturous paragraph was added to the end of the substr doc warning about some of these issues.

In reply to Re^6: lhs substr(): refs vs. scalars by ysth
in thread lhs substr(): refs vs. scalars by renodino

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