Thanks to perl's context sensitivity, you can have the best of both worlds. For the simple case, subroutines behave as passthru pass-by-value, but when the need arises to minimise memory allocation and copying, using it ina void context does the right thing

Now that's surely tempting, but could lead to rather odd situations: 

sub do_stuff {
    ...
    do_other_stuff($variable);
    # remove that debugging statement, and do_other_stuff
    # will behave very differently if do_stuff is not
    # called in void context
    print "still here\n";
}

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Admittedly that's a fairly artificial situation and won't show up in real code very often, but if it does it's very nasty to debug.

Designing interfaces around performance optimizations and memory management oddities just doesn't seem right to me.

In reply to Re^4: No garbage collection for my-variables by moritz
in thread No garbage collection for my-variables by betterworld

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