Your right it's not consistent. But IMHO consistency will most likely break legacy code.

I think you're saying that because you envision it being consistently broken (always dying) instead of it being consistently fixed (never dying).

There are two ways of fixing it:

• Have literal constants always return new values. That's inefficient.
• Have literal constants return copy-on-write values. There's currently no such mechanism, and that's a lot of work to implement.

Check out this bug that would also be fixed by either of the above two fixes:

for (1..2) {
   for (1..3) { print $_++; } # 123 234
   print "\n";
}
[download]

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