That's how I understand it, yes. Lexicals are re-used when iterating though a loop / subroutine note: recursive subroutine calls create a "stack" of lexicals - for obvious reasons - lookup goto &sub if you want to do tail recursion.

Ofcourse, if your program is structured well enough, you usually don't have to worry about it - what I mean is, if your variables go out of scope, you usually are going out of a sub or loop in which they will be used again.

The usual exception is some code that runs in stages, and you want to free as much memory as possible after you're done with one stage and enter the next, for instance, some code that needs to preprocess a lot of data in memory, write it out to a file and then go through the resulting file line by line - or something like that.

"What should it profit a man, if he should win a flame war, yet lose his cool?"

In reply to Re^5: Tracking down memory leaks by Joost
in thread Tracking down memory leaks by scain

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.