  On the half line we introduce a new sequence of near--best uniform
approximation polynomials, easily computable by the values of the approximated
function at a truncated number of Laguerre zeros. Such approximation
polynomials come from a discretization of filtered Fourier--Laguerre partial
sums, which are filtered by using a de la Vall\'ee Poussin (VP) filter. They
have the peculiarity of depending on two parameters: a truncation parameter
that determines how many of the $n$ Laguerre zeros are considered, and a
localization parameter, which determines the range of action of the VP filter
that we are going to apply. As $n\to\infty$, under simple assumptions on such
parameters and on the Laguerre exponents of the involved weights, we prove that
the new VP filtered approximation polynomials have uniformly bounded Lebesgue
constants and uniformly convergence at a near--best approximation rate, for any
locally continuous function on the semiaxis. \newline The theoretical results
have been validated by the numerical experiments. In particular, they show a
better performance of the proposed VP filtered approximation versus the
truncated Lagrange interpolation at the same nodes, especially for functions
a.e. very smooth with isolated singularities. In such cases we see a more
localized approximation as well as a good reduction of the Gibbs phenomenon.
