Perl 5 never GCs a sub's lexicals in the sense we're talking about here. Certainly things can happen to objects that go out of scope, but that's different.

Curiouser and curiouser (as someone famous, literally speaking, once said:).

Doesn't that imply that the often advised "scope as tightly as possible to reduce memory usage" is (at least some of the time) wrong? Or shouldn't I be asking such questions:)?