Re: using 'my'

I agree with all of those who say to 'use strict." However, using strict does not necessarily require the use of lexicals declared with my(). You may if you wish simply append main:: in front of all of your variables. That will declare your variables as global, which they already are anyway if you are not declaring them with my().

(Side note: Perl does not have true global variables. All variables exist only in the package in which they are defined. However, because main:: is the default package, variables that are non-lexical in main appear almost as if they are global.)

One point on 'use strict'. My brother has a magnificent e-commerce site written completely in Perl 5.00x It supports his entire family very nicely.

He does not 'use strict'! I told him that what he was doing was 'blasphemy.' He said that he does not view using Perl as a religious act. I cannot argue with success, but I will always use strict, and where possible I convert scripts written by others to strict when I maintain them.

Comment on Re: using 'my'

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Re (tilly) 2: using 'my' by tilly (Archbishop) on Jun 21, 2001 at 21:39 UTC
Actually there are a number of truly global variables in Perl. For instance no matter what package you are in, $ENV, $^W, $_, etc are always the same.	[reply]
Re: Re (tilly) 2: using 'my' by sierrathedog04 (Hermit) on Jun 22, 2001 at 02:07 UTC
You are correct. Camel III's glossary says: In Perl, only certain special variables are truly global—most variables (and all subroutines) exist only in the current package.	[reply]
Re: Re (tilly) 2: using 'my' by chip (Curate) on Jun 23, 2001 at 01:14 UTC
FWIW, those truly global variables are really all in the `main` package. The language parser acts as if those global variable names were prefixed with `main::` if no package is specified, no matter what package directive is in scope at the time. -- Chip Salzenberg, Free-Floating Agent of Chaos	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re (tilly) 4: using 'my' by tilly (Archbishop) on Jun 23, 2001 at 02:21 UTC
I know that. An amusing side-effect is that if someone mistakenly tries to throw an our on, say, $_ and they are in any package other than main::, it will not work as they expect. This might be considered a bug.	[reply]