My answer was tongue firmly in cheek. Note the tone and the :)'s scattered about. But please, submit a patch.
To clear up a misconception though, your "action at a distance" horror scenario there won't happen. No sir. $a and $b are (apparently) local'd to the block:
@list=qw( one two three four five );
$a="Hello";
$b="World";
sort { $a <=> $b } @list;
print "$a $b"; # Hello World
I knew this. Several others in channel this morning knew this. But in an ironic twist of events, I can't find where that localization is
documented. I think I see it in the Perl source...but not in the docs.