in reply to Re: 'my' and 'state' declaration inside a loop
in thread 'my' and 'state' declaration inside a loop

Thank you both for your wisdom.

I read the my and state docs before asking but I couldn't find an answer.

I understand that state was introduced as an improvement to my and that they have different purposes although they are overlapping in some cases and can be used to reach the same effect.

My question was basically conceptual.

Anyway, just if somebody is interested, it seems that there is, of course, a difference:

my $n; for (1..100000000) { $n=0 }

real    0m9.395s
user    0m9.397s
sys     0m0.000s
_________________________________


for (1..100000000) { my $n=0 }

real    0m12.773s
user    0m12.765s
sys     0m0.004s
_________________________________


for (1..100000000) { state $n=0 }

real    0m7.282s
user    0m7.244s
sys     0m0.008s

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Re^2: 'my' and 'state' declaration inside a loop
by GrandFather (Saint) on Aug 07, 2012 at 20:32 UTC

    state is not an 'improvement' of my. It is an improvement of Perl to provide a small feature that was missing - scoped static variables. The common part between my and state variables is that they can't be accessed by name outside their lexical scope. The prime difference between them is that my variables get a fresh chunk of memory each time their lexical scope is entered whereas static variables are assigned a chunk of memory at program start time and retain it until execution terminates.

    True laziness is hard work
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