I need help with my and scope. Management asked I audit someone else's code, and I came across what I thought was a problem with a variable going out of scope.

I wrote the following as a test, and to my surprise, it ran without errors! Now I'm really confused.

use strict;
use warnings;

sub scope_test() {
    my @test_array = (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6);
    return \@test_array;
}

print join ("\n", @{ scope_test() } );

[download]

I thought that @test_array was local to the function, so it would need to copy the data before returning a value. I thought that returning a reference to that variable would cause a problem, but it doesn't.

What's going on here? Am I crazy? Am I biased because C/C++ behaves differently with scope? Or am I complete wrong about scope in the first place, and it works this way in both Perl and C/C++? There's no style guide here, and sometimes I have a problem differentiating between "different from how I'd do it" and "wrong."

Thanks in advance for any help.

Edit: Updated the title for better search results later

In reply to my, scope, and references by chayashida

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