Skip to Main Content
Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition
book

Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

by Nathan Patwardhan, Ellen Siever, Stephen Spainhour
June 2002
Beginner content levelBeginner
759 pages
80h 42m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Perl in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Name

package

Synopsis

package namespace
                  

Declares that the rest of the innermost enclosing block, subroutine, eval, or file belongs to the indicated namespace. (The scope of a package declaration is thus the same as the scope of a local or my declaration.) All subsequent references to unqualified global identifiers will be resolved by looking them up in the declared packages symbol table. A package declaration affects only global variables—including those you’ve used local on—but not lexical variables created with my.

Using package without an argument is possible, but since its semantics are unclear, package; has been depracated in Perl 5.8. If you intend to disallow variables that aren’t fully qualified, use strict; instead.

Typically, you put a package declaration as the first thing in a file that will be included by the require or use operator, but you can put one anywhere that a statement would be legal. When defining a class or a module file, it is customary to name the package the same name as the file, to avoid confusion. (It’s also customary to name such packages beginning with a capital letter, because lowercase modules are, by convention, interpreted as pragmas.)

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Start your free trial

You might also like

Perl by Example, Fourth Edition

Perl by Example, Fourth Edition

Ellie Quigley
Perl Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Perl Cookbook, 2nd Edition

Tom Christiansen, Nathan Torkington
Perl in a Nutshell

Perl in a Nutshell

Nathan Patwardhan, Ellen Siever, Stephen Spainhour
Learning Perl, 7th Edition

Learning Perl, 7th Edition

Randal L. Schwartz, brian d foy, Tom Phoenix

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596002416Errata Page