Perl Debate Time ;-)

[Fred Steinberg]

 Tony> I think those who want to get rid of "local" are wrong. They are two
 Tony> completely different operators, used for two different purposes.

Right; dynamic vs lexcial scoping. Completely valid concepts, i.e. this is
not a debate about Perl syntax, it's a general concept.

 Tony> Variables declared with "my" are completely hidden from the outside
 Tony> world, /even subroutines called within the same block/, and /even if
 Tony> the subroutine is calling itself recursively./ According to "perldoc
 Tony> perlsub,"
     ...
 Tony> Hope this clears up the confusion.....

Indeed; a simple example always helps, in case anyone is still confused
(and cares):


    sub printfish { print "$fish "; }

    $fish = 'halibut';
    printfish;
    {
        local $fish = 'salmon';
        printfish;
    }
    printfish;


will print "halibut salmon halibut ".

If you change the 'local' to 'my', you get: "halibut halibut halibut ".
If you remove 'local' and 'my'  altogether, you get: "halibut salmon salmon ".

I tend to think of local as saving a temporary copy of the variable from
the outer scope.

I almost never use 'local', myself. But that's no reason to get rid of it.