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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

Private Variables in Subroutines

But if Perl can give us a new @_ for every invocation, can’t it give us variables for our own use as well? Of course it can.

By default, all variables in Perl are global variables; that is, they are accessible from every part of the program. But you can create private variables called lexical variables at any time with the my operator:

sub max {
  my($m, $n);       # new, private variables for this block
  ($m, $n) = @_;    # give names to the parameters
  if ($m > $n) { $m } else { $n }
}

These variables are private (or scoped) to the enclosing block; any other $m or $n is totally unaffected by these two. And that goes the other way, too—no other code can access or modify these private variables, by accident or design.[*] So, you could drop this subroutine into any Perl program in the world and know that you wouldn’t mess up that program’s $m and $n (if any).[] It’s also worth pointing out that, inside the if’s blocks, there’s no semicolon needed after the return value expression. Although Perl allows you to omit the last semicolon in a block, in practice you omit it only when the code is so simple that you can write the block in a single line.

The subroutine in the previous example could be made even simpler. Did you notice that the list ($m, $n) was written twice? That my operator can also be applied to a list of variables enclosed in parentheses, so it’s customary to combine those first two statements in the subroutine:

my($m, $n) = @_; # Name the subroutine parameters ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596520106Supplemental ContentErrata Page