Re^5: A specific term for a Perlism

[AnomalousMonk]

I'm with choroba on this. Whenever I see a phrase like "variable x is an alias of variable y", I immediately think that any operation upon x is really an operation upon y. The fanciness is implicit in the term itself, plain as it may be. See 'alias' in perlglossary.

Updates:

1. Maybe the big, fancy word you're thinking of is 'autovivification' (see also perlglossary), but that's something else entirely.
2. And BTW: 'aliasing' (both term and concept) is not a Perlism, i.e., something specific to Perl, it's a basic CS-ish notion.

[JupiterCrash]

You know, 'autovivification' just might be the word that I was thinking of. I had to look up its meaning, and reading it now, I do see that it is an entirely different thing than what I described. I probably once misunderstood what autovivification was and committed my own definition to memory, but I think that is the word I was looking for.

THANKS!

I know that aliasing is not unique to Perl. :) But, I think that the full behavior shown in my example and described in my quoted sentence from Modern Perl is probably unanticipated for most people who are accustomed to other languages.

[GrandFather]

autovivification is completely unrelated to the aliasing process you asked about. Aliasing is the correct and magical term for what happens to Perl loop variables (but not their C equivalents) and to what happens with @_ elements which are aliases of the parameters passed into a sub.

This is very important and subtle magic and the word "alias" captures exactly what is going on. A large part of the magic is that most of the time you don't need to be aware of it.

[Discipulus]

thanks and ++ for the perlglossary hint, never eard about it.

L*