problem with "our"

[JaSeong Ju]

Hi..

I'm new to perl.

How come this piece of code does not work in SunOs5.8, with perl v.
5.005_03 ?
--------------------
#!/usr/bin/perl

our $choice = 67.90;
print STDERR " value is: ", $choice, "\n";
exit(0);
-------------
The error is as follows:

Can't modify subroutine entry in scalar assignment at test6.pl line 3,
near "67.90;"
Execution of test6.pl aborted due to compilation errors.





The above script works well in Linux 2.4.20-8 kernel with perl v. 5.8.0.
Also, if "our" is replaced with "my", then script works in both operating
systems.

Is perl version 5.005_03 too old?

Many thanks.

JaSeong Ju

 

[Aaron Sherman]

I'm new to perl.

And your perl is old to me ;-)

How come this piece of code does not work in SunOs5.8, with perl v.
5.005_03 ?

The our keyword was introduced in 5.6.0, and is not available in your
version of Perl.

Thus, you have essentially written:

foo $bar = xxx

which Perl sees as:

$bar->foo() = xxx

which is why you're getting an error about modifying a subroutine.

Bottom line: use a newer Perl. 5.005_03 (released in 1999) is outdated
by 2 major and many more minor revisions. We're up to 5.8.3. I believe
at this point.

Staying within 2 years of current is probably wise with any language,
as storebought documentation and web or print articles about the
language will tend to be woefully out-of-date otherwise (try using STL
implementations from 1999 with modern C++ documentation, for example
;-)

That said, your Perl installation should have plenty of documentation
on how to establish global (package-scoped, of course) variables
without causing "strict" problems. See the documentation for the
"strict" and "vars" modules using the "perldoc" program for more
information.