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Learning Perl, 5th Edition
book

Learning Perl, 5th Edition

by Randal L. Schwartz, Tom Phoenix, brian d foy
June 2008
Beginner content levelBeginner
352 pages
11h 16m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Learning Perl, 5th Edition

Packages

Packages[] allow you to compartmentalize namespaces. Imagine that you have 10 programmers all working on one big project. If you use the global names $fred, @barney, %betty, and &wilma in your part of the project, what happens when I accidentally use one of those same names in my part? Packages let us keep them separate; I can access your $fred, and you can access mine, but not by accident. Packages are needed to make Perl scalable so that we can manage large programs. Packages are covered in great detail in the Alpaca.

[] The name “package” is perhaps an unfortunate choice, in that it makes many people think of a packaged-up chunk of code (in Perl, that’s a module or a library). All that a package does is define a namespace (a collection of global symbol names, like $fred or &wilma). A namespace is not a chunk of code.

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596520106Supplemental ContentErrata Page