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in reply to Consistency, syntax, and little minds

Wow, talk about a time warp! (it's just a jump to the left)

I ran across this thread looking for examples of the use of B::Generate (see diotalevi's post, below), for some enlightenment of my own.

When I read through the rest of the thread, I had a little chuckle realizing that few of the other commenters seem to have understood what you were asking for all those years ago - and it seems that none really saw the utility and advantage of it! Well, fast forward 9+ years but your idea is now in core, (more or less, unless I failed to understand it as well :), as of perl 5.14!

Recently I have been able to code on perl 5.14 and I find myself using this feature more and more often. I like that it adds a carefully-considered bit of DWIM in a places where I once added a lot of syntax that always felt tedious and distracting. I myself have wished explicit deref for push/keys/shift/etc. was unnecessary - and now it is! In the code where I am using this feature, other people working on or reviewing that code have expressed that they like the feature quite a bit.

More info here: http://perldoc.perl.org/perl5140delta.html#Syntactical-Enhancements
Original Patch and rationale from David Golden (xdg++) here: http://code.activestate.com/lists/perl5-porters/157092/