Thanks for pointing this obscure but oh-so-potentially useful behaviour out.

I see the "considered dangerous" phrase. Is it?

I found the (somewhat breif) description of it in perlop. As I discovered yesterday, writing code to reproduce this behaviour yourself is annoyingly difficult, but in the application of generating test data amongst others, would be very useful.

Would you use this in production code? Do you have any insight as to whether the behaviour is likely to remain in place or is it deprecated or destined to disappear sometime soon?