TL;DR

Of course I had to look into some way of doing binding in Perl too.

In previous post PWC126 - Minesweeper Game I used a binding to work on a matrix row, like this:

my @row := @field[$ri];

and eventually observed:

I guess that something similar can be done with Perl too… but I’m happy like this!

Of course that last statement was a lie, so I went on to look for it.

The first thing that I looked at is Data::Alias:

Data::Alias - Comprehensive set of aliasing operations

…

use Data::Alias;
...
alias @x = @y; # alias @x to @y

Seems spot on! Until I read this in the admittedly excellent documentation:

Perl 5.22 added some support for aliasing to the Perl core. It has a different syntax, and a different set of operations, from that supplied by this module; see “Assigning to References” in perlref. The core’s aliasing facilities are implemented more robustly than this module and are better supported. If you can rely on having a sufficiently recent Perl version, you should prefer to use the core facility rather than use this module. If you are already using this module and are now using a sufficiently recent Perl, you should attempt to migrate to the core facility.

Very well then… I plan on using nothing older than the already-old version v5.24, so let’s skip Data::Alias and move on to the official core way of doing this:

use feature 'refaliasing';
no warnings 'experimental::refaliasing';
...
\my @row = $field[$ri];

This is the way of doing the binding. Ehr, the aliasing. Whatever.

I’m not talking from a phylosophical standpoint — of course there might be a ton of subtleties where this is different from binding in Raku — but from the point of view of an unsophisticated programmer this is how we can obtain the same result.

Now I’m happy like this! Stay safe and have fun folks!