As delving into the documentation of Perl regarding syntax, I've found a paragraph that I'm unable to understand. I've got several question with the hope to understand these holy writings.

https://perldoc.perl.org/perlsyn.html last paragraph of Declarations

A statement sequence may contain declarations of lexically-scoped variables, but apart from declaring a variable name, the declaration acts like an ordinary statement, and is elaborated within the sequence of statements as if it were an ordinary statement. That means it actually has both compile-time and run-time effects.

Questions

1. What is an ordinary statement?
2. What are the run- and compile-time effects of this statement?
3. Are there more compile-time steps in perl than in C/C++ when defining a variable?

(Guess on (2) and (3))

• Based on what some of the languages do, I would guess that when a variable is defined, it is inserted into the symbol table, which is used by the semantic parser. When the grammar is correct, the code containing the variable is inserted into the output.
• There are N other passes that generate the binary.
• Then, when the binary is executed, the variable is used so has run-time effects.

Is that correct?

---

---

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! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

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:
	&		&
	<		&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.