Now I am curious as to what perl is doing internally. Can any monks offer a deeper explanation?

I think it iterates over the array instead of putting it on the stack. You can circumvent the optimisation by changing for (@a) to for ((),@a).

In reply to Re^2: How foreach loops decide what to iterate through (push array inside foreach) by ikegami
in thread How foreach loops decide what to iterate through by lefthanded

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