What is the difference between my and our in Perl?

Question

I know what my is in Perl. It defines a variable that exists only in the scope of the block in which it is defined. What does our do? How does our differ from my?

Answer 1

Coping with Scoping is a good overview of Perl scoping rules. It's old enough that our is not discussed in the body of the text. It is addressed in the Notes section at the end.

The article talks about package variables and dynamic scope and how that differs from lexical variables and lexical scope.

Answer 2

The perldoc has a good definition of our.

Unlike my, which both allocates storage for a variable and associates a simple name with that storage for use within the current scope, our associates a simple name with a package variable in the current package, for use within the current scope. In other words, our has the same scoping rules as my, but does not necessarily create a variable.

Answer 3

This is only somewhat related to the question, but I've just discovered a (to me) obscure bit of perl syntax that you can use with "our" (package) variables that you can't use with "my" (local) variables.

#!/usr/bin/perl

our $foo = "BAR";

print $foo . "\n";
${"foo"} = "BAZ";
print $foo . "\n";

Output:

BAR
BAZ

This won't work if you change 'our' to 'my'.

Answer 4

print "package is: " . __PACKAGE__ . "\n";
our $test = 1;
print "trying to print global var from main package: $test\n";

package Changed;

{
        my $test = 10;
        my $test1 = 11;
        print "trying to print local vars from a closed block: $test, $test1\n";
}

&Check_global;

sub Check_global {
        print "trying to print global var from a function: $test\n";
}
print "package is: " . __PACKAGE__ . "\n";
print "trying to print global var outside the func and from \"Changed\" package:     $test\n";
print "trying to print local var outside the block $test1\n";

Will Output this:

package is: main
trying to print global var from main package: 1
trying to print local vars from a closed block: 10, 11
trying to print global var from a function: 1
package is: Changed
trying to print global var outside the func and from "Changed" package: 1
trying to print local var outside the block 

In case using "use strict" will get this failure while attempting to run the script:

Global symbol "$test1" requires explicit package name at ./check_global.pl line 24.
Execution of ./check_global.pl aborted due to compilation errors.

Answer 5

#!/usr/bin/perl -l

use strict;

# if string below commented out, prints 'lol' , if the string enabled, prints 'eeeeeeeee'
#my $lol = 'eeeeeeeeeee' ;
# no errors or warnings at any case, despite of 'strict'

our $lol = eval {$lol} || 'lol' ;

print $lol;

Answer 6

The PerlMonks and PerlDoc links from cartman and Olafur are a great reference - below is my crack at a summary:

my variables are lexically scoped within a single block defined by {} or within the same file if not in {}s. They are not accessible from packages/subroutines defined outside of the same lexical scope / block.

our variables are scoped within a package/file and accessible from any code that use or require that package/file - name conflicts are resolved between packages by prepending the appropriate namespace.

Just to round it out, local variables are "dynamically" scoped, differing from my variables in that they are also accessible from subroutines called within the same block.