Enh, but then it's impossible to define subroutines that work like built-ins such as chomp.

I do that not infrequently.

However, I wouldn't mind having to go through hoops to get there. Perhaps a subroutine attribute would have to be set to allow you access to $_.

sub mychomp : getunderscore {
    s[${/}\z][];
}
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That way, no one could clobber $_ without intending to. And we could also add a pragma to disallow code outside of your file (or perhaps package) from clobbering $_ even if it wanted to.

-dlc