Scope of variables in a function

[Yitzchak Scott-Thoennes]

On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 12:13 PM, Andrew Beverley <andy at andybev.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2013-06-01 at 19:15 +0100, Anthony Lucas wrote:
>> It's not that it's not recommended, it's just that it's usually not what
>> you meant. There's nothing objectively wrong with not reinitialising a
>> variable on every call into your function.
>
> From the previously quoted perlsyn text "The behaviour ... is
> undefined... Future versions of perl might do something different from
> the version of perl you try it out on."
>
> That says to me that it should never be used?

Yes, if recollection serves me correctly, that statement was put in the docs
to discourage people from using "my $state_var if 0;" before we had state
instead of doing:

{
   my $x;
   sub foo {
   }
}

There were two reasons to discourage it; first, that it might someday get
fixed, since people kept getting hurt by it, and second, that it didn't actually
"work" in all cases (e.g. recursion).