They don't do the same thing when you put curly braces around them. Be careful with your word "same" there.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

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update: Since I managed to confuse a few people in the CB just now, let me add this:

our is a lexical-scoped aliasing of package variable (in the current package), while use vars is a package-scoped relaxation of the normal use strict rules. You cannot universally swap one for the other: they have overlapping uses and meanings, but also distinct uses and meanings.