If a method does a lot of work with member data, it seems inefficient to keep referring to $$self{x} over and over again. For many uses, it seems like it would be much more efficient to create a local lexical variable that's a reference to this value, e.g. my $x= \$${x}; and then refer to $$x in the function.

But for even heavier use, such as in a long loop, it would be even more efficient to copy the value to a local variable, and when done, copy the new value back.

But, I'm wondering if there is a nice way to simply make the local variable alias the other one without having to explicitly dereference it each time. For a single value, a dummy for loop that only executes one iteration can do exactly that. But is there a more general way?

—John

In reply to Aliasing Variables by John M. Dlugosz

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