I consider it a silly micro-optimization, ... And did you benchmark the cost of accessing the symbol table versus a lexical variable?

I don't prefer it for performance. I prefer it for the simplified syntax.

Most of my programs do IO also. Usually a few seconds at the beginning and the end. In between they do lots of cpu-intensive stuff. Often many hours of it. So, for your delectation:

#! perl -slw
use strict;
use Benchmark qw[ cmpthese ];


sub deref {
    my $r = shift;
    ++$r->[$_][1] for 0..$#$r;
}

sub alias {
    our @a;
    local *a = shift;
    ++$a[$_][1] for 0 .. $#a
}

my @a = map[1..3],1..1e6;;

cmpthese -1, {
    deref => sub { deref( \@a ) },
    alias => sub { alias( \@a ) },
};

__END__
c:\test>junk5
        Rate deref alias
deref 4.16/s    --  -12%
alias 4.72/s   13%    --
[download]

So 8 minutes saved on each hour. 3 hours over a day.

BTW: If you'd called your "Modern Perl" movement, "Beginner's Perl", I wouldn't have a problem with it. Well, if you also dropped the justifictions and stuck with the facts.