Re: assign to magic name-of-function variable instead of "return"

[James Mastros]

On Fri, Feb 02, 2001 at 05:01:29PM -0600, David L. Nicol wrote:
> > A /much/ better syntax, in [John Mastros's] humble opinion.  However,
"James", BTW.  (No, I don't really care.)
> > $__ must act sanely when we're called as an inner function (IE foo(bar(42))).
> if we allow $__ to have meaning more than one deep we'll be in action-at-a-distance
> land for sure.
Right, this is how I defined sanity.

> > [john porter] thinks that's unnecessarily baroque.  Just let $__ be an alias
> > to the return value stack, the place where return() puts its
> > args anyway.  
> > In fact, shouldn't it be @__ ?
>      ($a, $b, $c) = foo($_);  # ref($__ ) is now ARRAY
> This new variable could take the place of C<want>; or C<want> could mean 
> C<ref($__)>
Well, hold your horses a moment.  Does ref grok aliases?  (BTW, what's the
difference between an alias and an automagicly dereferenced ref?  If
nothing, why do we claim to never autoderef?)  Is assigning to @__ the same
as assigning to @{$__}?  Nope.  Does @$__ have any meaning if $__ is an
alias, not a reference?  Nope.

I'm quickly getting more confused here then I want to be, so I'm going to
stop now.

     -=- James Mastros
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