At 6:00 AM +0900 9/7/02, Paul Duncan wrote:
>I'm suspicious of anything Larry, or any of the top Perl brass, have to
>say regarding scoping rules.  Variable declaration in Perl is a
>nightmare: do you use "my", "our", "local", or a filehandle?

Erm... only my and our are declarations. local is not. And you'd use 
a filehandle presumably when you wanted to read or write from a file 
of some sort.

There are a few operations in perl that only act on global variables, 
rather than lexical ones (notably local, symbolic refs, and formats). 
Perl's appendix--vestigial remnants of an older time. Every language 
has them, and they're generally marked as deprecated.

I'd hardly call anything in perl nefarious, though. Well, with 
perhaps the exception of the source to the regex engine, but all 
regex engine code is evil.
-- 
                                         Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan / sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                       teddy bears get drunk