... *how* I should go about passing data that I might want to be "private" to a package.

Create your variable privately then don't pass it outside of your package. Likely you want to use my to create the variables.

I am confident that you do not want to be using function prototypes on any of these routines. That is you want: sub function {# do stuff instead of  sub function($) { #do stuff

Function prototypes are a completely different beast in Perl from those in C or C++. You very rarely want them. To emulate the control that C-style prototypes give you you explicitly check @_.

# off-hand code sub some { croak "Bad arg count to some" unless @_ == 2; croak "First arg to some not a ref" unless ref $_[0]; # etc. etc. return do_stuff(); }
Good perling.

In reply to Re: Package-Level Variables by rir
in thread Package-Level Variables by Anonymous Monk

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