It's one of my major peeves with Perl5: that inner subs don't work it is as reasonable to expect. The way they work in Javascript, for example.

It's the reason why you cannot use "my" variables in the top level of source files for mod_perl, when using Apache::Registry, the easy route from CGI to mod_perl.

There are articles on how to fix variables for inner subroutines, but the fact that you even need to worry about it is a major counterpoint against Perl, in my opinion.

The reason, as far as I gather, is because BEGIN (and related) blocks are actually subs, that are executed once; you can even use the syntax 

sub BEGIN {
    ...
}

[download]
and subs defined in BEGIN blocks are global subs.

And, Larry Wall and other prominent figures have said, years ago, that it'll never be "fixed". Because it is so by design.

In reply to Re^2: Inner subroutines? by bart
in thread Inner subroutines? by wsppan

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