Re: Improve readability of Perl code. Naming reference variables. [New Perl Feature]

[kcott]

There's a new feature that appeared in "developer release 5.25.3". It's mentioned in "(5.25.3) perldelta: Declaring a reference to a variable". Details are in "(5.25.3) perlref: Declaring a Reference to a Variable". The text of that last link starts with "Beginning in v5.26.0, ...": so, if you don't want to install a developer version (the latest is 5.25.9), you probably won't have long to wait for a stable one.

I think this is the sort of thing you were after:

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use 5.025003;
use strict;
use warnings;

no warnings 'experimental::refaliasing';
use experimental qw{refaliasing declared_refs};
use feature 'declared_refs';

{
    my $str  = \'string';
    my $list = [qw{a b c}];
    my $map  = {x => 24, y => 25, z => 26};

    func($str, $list, $map);
}

sub func {
    my (\$string, \@array, \%hash) = @_;

    say $string;
    say "@array";
    say "$_ => $hash{$_}" for sort keys %hash;

    return;
}

Sample run:

$ perl -v | head -2 | tail -1
This is perl 5, version 25, subversion 9 (v5.25.9) built for darwin-th
+read-multi-2level
$ pm_1179933_test_exp_declared_refs.pl
string
a b c
x => 24
y => 25
z => 26

Important: Do note that this feature is experimental; subject to change; and, as such, not suitable for production code.