BrowserUk: exactly, the order matter. the slot for the variable is created (no errors for undeclared variables) but the assignement not yet. BEGIN blocks jump directly in runtime during the compilation of the program. Quite a good feature!

Consider the output of the following snippet: perl -wE "my $time = time; BEGIN{say time; sleep 5}; say $time"

PS the above behaves the same with lexical and package vars:

perl -E "$time = time; BEGIN{say time; sleep 5}; say $time"

L*