Well, technically what is happening is not violating Camel III.
See, it *does* get its own scratchpad, which can be quickly
checked by:
#!/opt/perl/bin/perl -w
use strict;
sub foo;
sub foo {
return unless $_ [0];
my $x if 0;
print ++ $x, " ";
foo $_ [0] - 1;
}
foo 1; print "\n";
foo 2; print "\n";
foo 3; print "\n";
foo 4; print "\n";
__END__
1
2 1
3 2 1
4 3 2 1
Scary, isn't? When the subroutine recurses, it notices there is still
a reference to
$x and hence it will create a new
scratchpad. But when there is no reference, it will reuse an old
scratchpad....
I do agree that using my in this way doesn't tend to lead
to well understood code. I wouldn't go as far as to say it's never
useful, but such cases will be very rare and it's not a technique I
would teach in my classes.
-- Abigail