Re: Help needed understanding global variables in Perl

This is a good discussion because it brought out some subtle differences between our and globals declared without a scoping qualifier (and use vars ...) that I hadn't thought about. I've actually only been using 5.6 for a while now so our is a bit new to me.

Here's my question: I was looking at our as a way to declare a global package variable and access that variable unqualified from its package while using strict. But if our also implies scoping where regular globals don't, are there other differences? The big question here would relate to global package variables accessed by other packages. I'm thinking of things like $VERSION and @ISA. Is there a difference declaring these with our versus declaring them unqualified with an associated use vars? our scoping rules seem to indicate that declaring these at the top of a file (compilation unit) limits their scope to that compilation unit. If so, what does that mean for variables accessed by other packages, like @ISA?

Comment on Re: Help needed understanding global variables in Perl

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Re: Re: Help needed understanding global variables in Perl by erikharrison (Deacon) on Mar 05, 2002 at 15:10 UTC
I do not claim to have plumbed the depths of `our`. However, this seems to be the deal: 'our' variables are package variables, just like $main::foo, except that `our` makes a LEXICALLY scoped declaration that the variable has been legally imported - basically, you can use it's unqualified package name under `use strict`. `use strict; package foo; our $y = "This is in package foo"; # $x and $y both package $foo::x = "This is in package foo"; # variables print $foo::x; { #bare block our $x; print $x; #$x = $foo::x } #end of bare block print $x #Give a warning under use strict #because the 'our' declaration #is out of scope package bar; print $foo::y; #prints $y declared with 'our' in package foo print $foo::x; #prints $x declared with package name in foo` [download] I don't know if that helps any, (or just confused) but there it is - the weirdness (and, I think, good use) of `our`. Cheers, Erik	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: Re: Help needed understanding global variables in Perl by gellyfish (Monsignor) on Mar 05, 2002 at 15:03 UTC
I'm thinking of things like $VERSION and @ISA. These kind of things are fine, you are only declaring them with `our` for your own convenience within your module - when they are accessed by perl itself or by another module (in the case of `$VERSION` and ExtUtils::MakeMaker for instance,) they are accessed as if they were fully qualified. Infact h2xs does declare them as `our` by default : `our @ISA = qw(Exporter); # .. removed the comments our %EXPORT_TAGS = ( 'all' => [ qw( ) ] ); our @EXPORT_OK = ( @{ $EXPORT_TAGS{'all'} } ); our @EXPORT = qw( ); our $VERSION = '0.01';` [download] /J\	[reply] [d/l] [select]