I believe the point of "my" declarations is to simplify finding the "root" of a scoped variable. Variable scoping is an effect of command nesting; in your example the "$count{$word}" declaration is nested in the first foreach loop, which is within the scope of the "my $word" declaration and the "my %count" declaration (necessarily added by FunkyMonk). The variables have this scope because they are outside the loop. That means the variables are also available to the next foreach loop. Since the only one used is %count, you could write: foreach (@words) { my $word = $_; and the scope of $word would be limited to the nest where it is actually used.

Unfortunately, niether your nor FunkyMonk's code actually works properly because of "@words=<STDIN>". I am sure what you wanted to do was this:

#!/usr/bin/perl
use warnings;
use strict;
chomp(my $input = <STDIN>);
my @words = split / /,$input;
my %count;
foreach my $word (@words) {  
   $count{$word} += 1;
}
foreach my $key (sort keys %count) { 
   print "$key was found $count{$key} times\n";
}

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Scoping and the purpose of the "my" declaration will become much clearer when you are writing longer, more complicated and more heavily nested scripts with subroutines, etc. Do stick with "use strict"

In reply to Re^3: Syntax error - "my" within foreach loop by halfcountplus
in thread Syntax error - "my" within foreach loop by Klammer

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