Yes, a sad state of affairs indeed. I came across Data::Alias looking at Elizabeth Mattijsen's Data::Reuse, but I remember problems building Data::Alias on HP-UX 11.0, an then did not even try cygwin.

Maybe Data::Bind could be used in some places. On the positive side direct support from the core for true aliases is planned; Nicholas Clark has actually already done a lot (IIRC nobody commented on p5p, but true aliases are needed for the perl6_on_perl5 scheme).

cheers --stephan