I was tinkering with some code tonight and realized a clean way to solve a problem was to pass an array of references to a sub. Problem was the entities I wanted references to were being obtained as a slice of an array. So I tried what seemed to me to be the obvious thing:

my @sliceRefs = \@array[4, 5, 9];

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and what do ya know? It just worked!

After I had tried the construct and it worked I had a vague memory of reading about it somewhere, but I sure can't find it now. It's not in the slice section in perldata and I can't find anything in perlref. Not that it matters. DWIM rules, but I'd be interested to find where it is documented.

Oh, you want to test it for yourself? Try:

my @array = (1 .. 10);
my @sliceRefs = \@array[4, 5, 9];

${$sliceRefs[2]} = -10;
print "@array";

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Perl is environmentally friendly - it saves trees

In reply to referencing slices - love that DWIM by GrandFather

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