Yeah, there's a much better and cheaper way - don't name them, name the indices into @_ via constant subs,

Yeah! I demonstrated the potential for that back in Micro optimisations can pay off, and needn't be a maintenance problem & despite the jury's verdict, the performance gains attributable to minimising subroutine call overhead in that type of cpu intensive, heavily iterative (3d graphics with hidden line removal) are distinctly measurable.

I'd only use this for subs that are unavoidably called at the centre of several levels of loop. The 2D & 3D Vector classes in the code in Re: Re^2: Micro optimisations can pay off, and needn't be a maintenance problem (I don't believe it) are a perfect example of the sort of code that can benefit from this technique.

Any particular reason for using constant subs? It achieves the same thing, but to me use constant is just clearer of the intent and saves a little typing:

use constant { FOO => 0, BAR => 1 };
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What would be really cool is for an alternative sub declaration syntax that declared scoped constants for subs. Eg.

sub Point3D::new( CLASS, X, Y, Z ) {
    return bless [ @_[ X, Y, Z ] ], $_[ CLASS ];
}
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