On Sun, 2004-06-20 at 14:49, Glenn Linderman wrote: > So, in the situation where you have a countable number of parameters as > the target of the sort, such as your example, or > > ($first, $second, $third, $fourth) = sort @ary; # only sort 4 entries > > @most[ 0 .. 6 ] = sort @ary; # only sort 7 entries > > the compiler could derive the hint, in a similar manner as it presently > (recent feature) derives the in-place optimization. Yes, exactly. We would begin by providing the hint for the simple cases and gradually exapnd the range of optimized situations . I imagine a working intermediate stage where your first example is optimized and your second is not, but maybe the second is already optimized to ($most[0],$most[1],$most[2],$most[3],$most[4],$most[5],$most[6]) = ... at some level, in which case we could get them both at the same time. -- david nicol "People used to be able to read my thoughts, but it doesn't appear to work any more. Should I eat less cheese?" -- Elizabeth Woods