Here are two examples of things that vars does differently and better than our.

First let's assume you haven't seen the light of packages and use Library.pm: 

use strict;
use vars qw($foo);
# ... code that uses $foo ...
1;

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And then you have script.pl 
use strict;
use Library;
# You can now use $foo freely.

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The other example goes like this: 
use vars qw($foo);
# Some code here.

package Bar;
# Now you can't use $foo, and won't accidentally access $main::foo.

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Both examples are admittedly trivial. But in both cases what vars does is better than what our would do.

Now where is the win with using our? It is that it lets people write this: 

package Foo;
use strict;
use Exporter qw(import);
our @EXPORT_OK = qw(foo);
# etc
1;

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instead of the 1 line longer 
package Foo;
use strict;
use Exporter qw(import);
use vars qw(@EXPORT_OK);
@EXPORT_OK = qw(foo);
# etc
1;

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or the (to many people) less aesthetic 
package Foo;
use Exporter qw(import);
@EXPORT_OK = qw(foo);
use strict;
# etc
1;

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This win does not, in my eyes, qualify as important enough to make our be a major improvement in Perl. Nor does it make it a significant improvement on vars.

That said, Larry Wall's thinking is that our was a declaration on which he could hang other syntax. Yes, this is the famous "my Dog $spot" discussion. That hasn't happened in Perl 5, nor does it seem likely to in the near future, but it is supposed to in Perl 6. At which point our would have substantially greater functionality. But that hasn't happened yet.

In reply to Re^16: the "our" declaration ?!! (special vars) by tilly
in thread the "our" declaration ?!! by perlpal

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