Programming Perl, 4th Edition

Scoped Declarations

Like global declarations, lexically scoped declarations have an effect at the time of compilation. Unlike global declarations, lexically scoped declarations only apply from the point of the declaration through the end of the innermost enclosing scope (block, file, or eval—whichever comes first). That’s why we call them lexically scoped, though perhaps “textually scoped” would be more accurate, since lexical scoping has little to do with lexicons. But computer scientists the world over know what “lexically scoped” means, so we perpetuate the usage here.

Perl also supports dynamically scoped declarations. A dynamic scope also extends to the end of the innermost enclosing block, but in this case, “enclosing” is defined dynamically at runtime rather than textually at compile time. To put it another way, blocks nest dynamically by invoking other blocks, not by including them. This nesting of dynamic scopes may correlate somewhat to the nesting of lexical scopes, but the two are generally not identical, especially when any subroutines have been invoked.

We mentioned that some aspects of use could be considered global declarations, but other aspects of use are lexically scoped. In particular, use not only imports package symbols, it also implements various magical compiler hints, known as pragmas (or if you’re into classical Greek, pragmata). Most pragmas are lexically scoped, including the strict pragma we mention from time to time. See the later section Pragmas. (Hence, ...