> What's the point?

Obviously the allocated space is reused, leaving it in a defined state is maybe faster and works in 99.9% of all cases but is nevertheless *dirty*.

And an extra opcode "ResetPad" realised in C can't be too expensive in comparison to the overall overhead of function calls.

UPDATES:

1. Only if the reference counter is 0, then clearing the PAD only means supporting the garbage collection.

   (The reference counter is not neccessarily 0 at the end of the scope)

2. hmm actually whenever the reference counter is decremented to 0 it might be the best occasion to set the variable to undefined, this would lead to a very consistent behaviour.

3. I have to admit that some people might interpret this behaviour as a feature! I mean if noninitialised lexvars act like closuresvars, but only teh sub is in the same level of recursion! One might even calculate the level of recursions...spooky! But I bet this behaviour is not guaranteed! 8 )

   ---

   In reply to Re^4: Confusion over scope of "my" vars by LanX
   in thread Confusion over scope of "my" vars by Anonymous Monk

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

   ---

4. Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
5. Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
6. Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
7. 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
8. 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

9. 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;

10. Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
11. See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.