Sure, blocks would be sufficient, I totally agree. But if you really want to mimic the C/C++ behavior (I am not really convinced by the idea, but let's assume you want to do it for the sake of argument), then you could have something like this: 
use strict;
use warnings;

main();

sub main {
     my $var1 = "foo";
     my $var2 = "bar";
     my $return_val = process_data ($var1, $var2);
     # ...
}

[download]
then all your variables are truly "local" (I really mean lexically scoped). But I think that Perl offers better alternatives; trying to write C code in Perl is probably not a very good idea. I was only saying that it can be done if you really want to.

In reply to Re^3: does perl have a concept of "int main()"? (variable scoping question) by Laurent_R
in thread does perl have a concept of "int main()"? (variable scoping question) by Special_K

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.