Perl has two different kinds of variables, private variables declared with my and package variables (usually) declared with our

• a lexical scope in Perl is anything from declaration till end of enclosing { block }
• the biggest possible lexical scope outside a block is the file, aka file-scope
• lexical ( i.e. "as you read" the static code ) is opposed to "dynamic" (i.e. run-time effects)
• main:: and other package s are namespaces not scopes, think of them as hashes of variables and functions
• my variables do not belong to namespaces, our vars do
• global means accessible everywhere, all namespaces including vars and subs are global as long as you use the *fully::qualified::name
• special variables always belong to main::

for sources, e.g. "Scoping" see

• perlintro#Variable-scoping
• perlglossary#scope
• modern-perl

Update

And an excellent overview can be found in

• Coping with Scoping

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