I admit. I don't get it. :-)

  foo(($x) x 2)

is supposed to be a lazy way to do

  foo($x, $x)

right? How is that evil? They will both give the same results (i.e. that $x is 12 after the call). What might one expect instead? Is my translation incorrect?

The thing you get bitten by here is just the aliasing, not the x operator as I understand it.

Update: Ah, got it. My translation was incorrect (because it actually was a correct translation). Seems like Perl does good dwim in this case, with the i meaning ihb. :-)   ($x) x $n in list context could be believed to be equivalent to

  map $x => 1 .. $n
  # or
  sub { ($x) x $n } -> ()
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which both return copies of the values and the output would then be

  11 11
  10
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Good thinking, japhy.

ihb