[Guido van Rossum]
I was sad because Perl seemed to use dynamic scoping when you declare a local variable. Tim has since explained that Perl's local is in fact ancient. I'm also sad that Perl doesn't default to locals, but that's not my problem.
Agreed. I've been using Perl since Perl 1, all the way to Perl 5. When the `local()' declaration appeared, probably around Perl 2 or Perl 3 (I do not remember), I started using it everywhere in an effort of protecting each procedure against each other. It was also a convenient way to give names to formal arguments, through "local(name1, name2, ...) = @_" as the first statement in a `sub'. When "my(LIST)" appeared, one or two major releases later, I progressively converted all my programs to use it, as it is more in the spirit of what I wanted. The overall impression that was left to me is that a lot of declarations are needed, anyway, if you consistently aim clean Perl scripts. So, there is now an "our(...)" declaration in Perl? Hopefully, it will not miss me much! :-) And who remembers the "own" specifier of Algol-60? :-) -- François Pinard http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard