You seem to imply it's not safer. Having a bug doesn't make it unsafe, it's makes it buggy.

You're also wrong that I don't realize @_ also gets affected. It just slipped through the cracks even though I remembered while I was composing the post. I usually use local * to do aliasing where this isn't a problem. I never localize $_ because it's suppose to be a shortcut but ends up longer.

Fixed.

As for my $_, that's new to the current version. Most people who come here don't use the latest version of Perl yet. I was going for a working solution, not a theoretical one. Thanks for mentioning it as an alternative, though.