Samurai, local() operates on things that live in the symbol table - lexicals don't and you can't local()ize a lexical. You *can* use nested my() calls but that's almost always the wrong thing.

# This prints:
# Lexicals: 12
# Globals: 34

use strict;

# nested my() example
my $lex = 1;
{
#  local $lex; this line is a syntax error
  my $lex = 2;
  print "Lexicals: $lex ";
}
print "$lex\n";

# local()ized global
our $global = 3;
{
  local $global;
  $global = 4;
  print "Globals: $global ";
}
print "$global\n";
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