Well, they are. Sort of. our creates an alias to a package variable. That is, our $foo is an alias to $PACKAGE::foo, where PACKAGE is your current package. The package variable will always exist, but the alias is lexically scoped.

    use strict;
    $main::foo = 1;
    {
        our $foo;
        print $foo, "\n";
    }
    # print $foo, "\n";
    print $main::foo, "\n";
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This prints 1\n1\n. But if you remove the #, the code doesn't compile.

Abigail