I'm not quite sure what you mean by "misses the point"?

I thought you were looking for a way to avoid your percieved inefficiencies of using grep to filter large arrys. The only 'inefficiency' that really exists is that (notionally) a list is created on one side of the grep which is then filtered and assigned back to the array on the other. Ie. Perl trades space for time.

Given the way Perl implements it's arrays, there is no trivial way of removing an element from the middle.

[@myarray]-->[ 0 ]->[ value 1 ]
             [ 1 ]->[ value 2 ]
             [ 2 ]->[ value 3 ]
             [ 3 ]->[ value 4 ]
             [ 4 ]->[ value 5 ]
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To remove a value from the middle (say element 2) in-place, you have to ripple the pointers.

[@myarray]-->[ 0 ]---->[ value 1 ]
             [ 1 ]---->[ value 2 ]
             [ 2 ]-\
             [ 3 ]-\\->[ value 4 ]
                    \->[ value 5 ]
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In effect (if not in exact implementation), is to copy pointers from the old list into a new one omiting those that fail the test. Then discard the old array if the destination is the same as the source. Very efficient cpu-wise but does require a extra memory.

Doing it in-place avoids the extra memory, but there is no way to void the ripple. That's basically what my snippet did. It's obviously not going to be as fast, though I was surprised how little slower it was. Whether it would be possible to add an optimisation to grep to do this in line if the dest == src I'm not sure. I know that sort has a similar 'in-place' optimisation for dest == src invocations.

With respect to the need for the ';'... It's required to allow the parser to determine that your inner code block

@moo = grep {; {if ($_ % 2 > 0){ 0;last; } 1;}}  @moo;
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Is a code block and not an anonymous hash. More typically this is done with a unary '+'

@moo = grep { +{if ($_ % 2 > 0){ 0;last; } 1;} }  @moo;
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Alternatively, you could avoid the need for the inner block completely and do

@moo = grep { not ( $_ % 2 ) }  @moo;
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Why the inner code block?

As mentioned before, and explained in the comments, this is a trivial example that is meant to mimic the behavior of a foreach with the "added feature" I discussed earlier

The concept is to come up with something that could work with fairly complex code. Perhaps it is going to start with a list of servers - do some checks and remove from the array all of the servers that respond in a certain way when queried. This may take more than the trivial one line of code. "I" may also want to "fall out" of the code at many different points. That is why I made a version that had the "last" command in it.

I did not mention in the code my "normal" procedure either

my @temp;
foreach (@moo) {if (! ($_ % 2)){push @temp, $_;}}
@moo=@temp;
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Which might I add, for an array or 1,000,000 elements benchmarks at around half of the time of any of the examples of that have an inner block (the last example above without the inner block cheats becuase it cannot be changed for any reasonable increase in code complexity

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Why does the parser have trouble when it is in a grep?

my $i=1;
{{{print "$i";}; if ($i++ < 5){redo;}}}
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Runs without hessitation, it is just nested code blocks for goodness sakes......and why can I do a last or redo within the codeblock of a grep - Why do I need to nest a second block in there?

Just curious
--Spandox

PS: anyone figure out why I needed the ';' in between the squigle brackets for the code blocks?

At a guess I'd say it's so perl can disambiguate between a block of code and the start of a hash ref construction.