My point was simply that it was a good by the book example of a closure. I stand by that statement.

Your issue seems to be more with how foreach makes its iterator variable an alias to the underlying object. I take it that you think it should be a copy, and not an alias? Well, that isn't very perl4-ish, and foreach has a long history. Just sticking with modern stuff, consider

foreach my $i ( @list ) {
   $i =~ s/foo/bar/g;
}
go_do_something(@list);
[download]

Would you expect the go_do_something() routine to get the unmodified values of @list, or would you expect the s/foo/bar/g transformation to have occured?