in reply to BEGIN initialization and memory

I believe it does make sense that an initialization routine (inside BEGIN) block actually keeps the variables hanging around, otherwise you wouldn't have initialized variables, would you?

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Re: Re: BEGIN initialization and memory
by chromatic (Archbishop) on Jul 23, 2003 at 23:12 UTC

    What would you expect to happen here?

    BEGIN
{
    my $x = 'foo';
}

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    Outside of the block, would you expect to see a variable named $x? Would you expect it to have a value?

    In fact, it doesn't, because the normal lexical scoping rules apply. BEGIN isn't extra special magic in that variables leak out. It's just a normal block that happens to execute at a special time.

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Re: Re: BEGIN initialization and memory
by bsb (Priest) on Jul 23, 2003 at 23:09 UTC
    Is the memory used for the code/ops/(?) of a BEGIN block released after it is executed? I'm thinking particularly of initialization code.

    I'm talking about the memory required for the compiled perl code of the BEGIN block itself.

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