Monks, my thanks to 'dave the m' and the rest of you that contributed to this thread. My eyes have been opened, and now I see ... that even if there's a my var declared in a block prior to a sub definition, obvious to me plain as day, and surely the sub can use it -- yet, after the compile phase, the my var may be gone. I see it (lexically!) in the code, but it's gone. Sure, if the sub uses it, it's squirreled away a ref to it in its pad. And the debugger knows about pads and such.

It wasn't clear to me that lexicals are for the compiler, and may not exist after the compiler phase.

-- Lee