Editing Aliasing (computing) (section)

== Specified aliasing ==
Controlled aliasing behaviour may be desirable in some cases (that is, aliasing behaviour that is specified, unlike that enabled by memory layout in C). It is common practice in [[Fortran]]. The [[Perl]] [[programming language]] specifies, in some constructs, aliasing behaviour, such as in {{code|foreach}} loops. This allows certain data structures to be modified directly with less code. For example,

<syntaxhighlight lang="perl">
my @array = (1, 2, 3);

foreach my $element (@array) {
    # Increment $element, thus automatically
    # modifying @array, since $element is ''aliased''
    # to each of @array's elements in turn.
    $element++;
}

print "@array \n";
</syntaxhighlight>
will print out "2 3 4" as a result. If one wanted to bypass aliasing effects, one could copy the contents of the index variable into another and change the copy.