Wow. @colors was modified. Didn't think of that. That explains a lot. So it all boils down to a subtle difference between localizing and aliasing:

• our $name. Inside a foreach loop, the subroutine closes over the $main::name. It gets the localized value whenever $main::name is localized and the global value when not, just as does $main::name. Any assignment to $main::name within the closure changes the global variable at whatever localization level it happens to be running in.
• my $name;. Inside the foreach loop, the subroutine closes over whatever $name happens to be aliased to, in this case, $colors[0] when $name eq 'red' and $colors[-1] when $name eq 'violet'. No matter where the subroutine runs, any assignment to $name within the closure changes the thing aliased, i.e. an element of @colors

In the above quote from perlsyn it says both my and our are localized and doesn't make a distinction between aliasing and localizing. In your opinion is this a documentation bug? a perl bug? or neither?

Thanks, beth

Update: LanX's comment below is helpful here. He points out that lexical variables (i.e. my $name) can't be localized, so temporary aliasing is a way of faking it. Inside the loop itself, temporary aliasing is pretty much indistinguishable from localizing, but the differences between the two (localization and aliasing) become much more noticable if the variable is captured by a closure.

---

---

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.