Re^5: Reassigning $_ in loop doesn't stick

in reply to Re^4: Reassigning $_ in loop doesn't stick
in thread Reassigning $_ in loop doesn't stick

ikegami,
I thought this might be what you meant on my way home from work. I just can't think of a good reason for it. It would be quite interesting if it worked in assignment (my $alias_to_foo = grep $_, $foo;) but it doesn't. So what benefit is there that the return value is an alias into the original list?

Cheers - L~R

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Re^6: Reassigning $_ in loop doesn't stick by ikegami (Patriarch) on Jan 22, 2009 at 05:19 UTC
Efficiency (speed and memory). You can pass it to `for`, a function, etc to be modified. Use the return as an lvalue. Well, you can take a reference to it at least. Simplicity. It takes extra work to make the copy. Mainly, I figure it just happened to work that way. And since there's no reason to change it, they decided to document it.	[reply] [d/l]

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