No it's quite a serious & well written module. Hopefully it will become part of perl5i - https://metacpan.org/module/perl5i https://metacpan.org/module/perl5i

No it's quite a serious & well written module. Hopefully it will become part of perl5i - https://metacpan.org/module/perl5i https://metacpan.org/module/perl5i &_ is an explicit $_ You use $* or &* when you need to check $_[0] first. So &_ is more correct with general map but $* (and &*) will work also in this autobox example (in fact i had used it in my first edit but preferred aesthetics of &_ especially with previous usage of $* only being deprecated in 5.10). NB. Above in code just for aesthetics!