The perlmod man page is showing every piece that you might want to include. Most of them you do not need to include in any given module. Furthermore as a best practice I strongly suggest not including @EXPORT or %EXPORT_TAGS.

The BEGIN block looks useless to me. Its only important effect in the first version is to limit the scope of the variables declared with our. In the second version it does nothing useful.

On our vs use vars, I do not consider vars obsolete. What it does it does better than our does. See Why is 'our' good? for more detail on why I think that.

The parens after Exporter is a subtle micro-optimization, they avoid calling Exporter::import when it will be doing nothing. You can do it if you want - it certainly doesn't hurt - but I usually don't worry about things like that unless performance is a known problem.

I'd suggest a template that looks something like this: 

package Foo;
use Exporter;
@ISA = qw(Exporter);
@EXPORT_OK = qw(); # Exportable things go here
$VERSION = 0.01;
use strict;

# Functions etc go here.
 
1;

__END__

=head1 NAME

Foo.pm - What is it?

=head1 SYNOPSIS

  use Foo;
  # Do something with it.

=head1 DESCRIPTION

Yada, yada.

=head1 EXAMPLES

=head1 AUTHOR

[download]
Note the trick of putting the special variables before strict.pm, eliminating any need to bother declaring them.

In reply to Re: standard perl module and BEGIN block. by tilly
in thread standard perl module and BEGIN block. by hartzell

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