Eh? You will need to post code because it has nothing to do with $a and $b being in one package or another. You can see this example works fine.

You can declare a my $a or my $b in package main but not in package Sort as these vars need to be package globals there for sort() to work.

package Sort;

# my($a,$b); # <<-- can't do that in this package

sub my_num_sort {
    my $list_ref = shift;
    # return as a list ref for efficiency
    return [sort { $b <=> $a } @$list_ref];
}

package main;

# my($a,$b); # <<-- you can do this in this package (no sorts)

my @list = ( 10, 42, 66, 1, 81, 32 );

# pass and return as a list ref for efficiency
my $sorted = Sort::my_num_sort(\@list);

print "$_ " for @$sorted;
[download]

cheers

tachyon

s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print

Ah. Sorry. The method doesn't actually do the sort (too much copying for my tastes). It just defines the sort rules. Something like:

package MyOrder;
use strict;
# export junk goes here...

my %order = (
# order hash goes here...
);

sub SortMyWay {  
  if ( exists $order{$a} and exists $order{$b} ) {
    return $order{$a} <=> $order{$b}
  } elsif ( exists $order{$a} ) {
    return 1
  } elsif ( exists $order{$b} ) { 
    return -1 
  } else { 
    return $a cmp $b 
  } 
} 

package main;
use strict;
# use the module with the sort stuff in it, 
# which also exports sub SortMyWay

my @foo = (
# stuff to sort goes here...
);

my @bar = sort SortMyWay @foo;
[download]

and of course I get an error. sigh. I wonder if AUTOLOAD could do it. I never used that before...

Just do the actual sort in the MyOrder Package as shown. Note as we pass list references we pass 4 bytes in and 4 bytes out of the MyOrder package.

package MyOrder;

my %order = ( );

sub SortCriteria {  
  if ( exists $order{$a} and exists $order{$b} ) {
    return $order{$a} <=> $order{$b}
  } elsif ( exists $order{$a} ) {
    return 1
  } elsif ( exists $order{$b} ) { 
    return -1 
  } else { 
    return $a cmp $b 
  } 
}

sub SortMyWay { 
    my $list_ref = shift; 
    return [sort SortCriteria @$list_ref]; 
}

package main;

use strict;

my @foo = qw( j a p h , );

my $bar = MyOrder::SortMyWay(\@foo);
my @bar = @$bar;

print "@bar";
[download]

cheers

tachyon

s&&rsenoyhcatreve&&&s&n.+t&"$'$`$\"$\&"&ee&&y&srve&&d&&print

_____________________________________________________
Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker, who'd like a (from-home) job
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;