Actually, I will confess to an atypical ignorance on the difference between "local" and "private" and will defer to the real Perl experts on this forum to answer your very appropriate question.

The point I was trying to make is that to make a variable which is global to a source file, you put the "my" outside all subroutine defintions, and that you could make a relatively localized variable which persists its value through the use of braces in what I believe is called "lexical scoping".

Regardless of the terms, the sample demonstrates a number of functionally distinct scope limits for your variables.

We should know the professional terms, but I, frankly, don't.