Bowen, Bruce <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
: If I "declare" my 'lexical variables' at the beginning of a
: file, and then refer to the variable without the 'my ' in front
: of it, does that change it back to a package variable or does
: that create a new package variable?
Once a variable is declared using 'my' it can never be also be
a package variable. They can refer to each other in such a way that
changing one seems to change the other, but they are not the same
type of variable.
Think of the two types of perl variables as an apple orchard
and peach orchard. If we grow an apple tree it can never become
a peach tree and there are no peachapple trees. :)
In no case can you use 'my' on the same variable in the same
scope. Well, you can, but the warnings module will throw a warning
about masking an earlier declaration. If your not sure what scope
is, read the article I mentioned earlier.
http://perl.plover.com/FAQs/Namespaces.html
Now, you should try to keep your variables in the smallest
scope possible. That means do not declare all of them at the top of
your script. In some programming languages this is encouraged. Not
in perl. Trust me and don't do it like that.
Having said that, there are sometimes reasons to place a
variable at the top of a script. Configuration variables come to
mind. While developing it is nice to have a configuration hash at
the top of the script. In production, we would probably add a
configuration or serialization module and place that information
in another file.
HTH,
Charles K. Clarkson
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