Is the "additional level of complexity just for this" just for diagnostic purposes, or is it something sneeky that the "user" ends up seeing?

If it is for diagnostic purposes you might want to take a look at the debugging support in Perl rather than poluting your code with diagnostic lint that obfusicates intent and probably adds bugs of its own.

For a very brief overview of the debugger see Using the Perl Debugger in the Tutorials section.

DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel

In reply to Re: Print name of variable to STDOUT? by GrandFather
in thread Print name of variable to STDOUT? by bowei_99

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