> Dan Muey wrote:
> >
> > I read in an earlier email that some people put _ in front
> > of variables/function/etc to show that they are "important
> and should
> > be handled by the program only" and it said that some
> "modules enforce
> > this"
>
> Hi Dan.
>
> This is historical stuff, and ugly too. When there was no
> proper protection against invading foreign namespaces, people
> decided to use 'unlikely' prefixes to their variable names to
> try to stop them being used elsewhere. DEC (now Compaq), for
> instance, decided to use dollar and double-dollar as prefixes
> for their operating-system variables.
>
> Perl is different in that you can't write, say, an interrupt
> handler, which interfaces directly with the system. But
> namespaces do exist (as packages) and there's no way that you
> can prevent one package's software accessing another's.
>
> Lexical variables are another matter, as they don't belong to
> a given package but exist globally as long as there is a
> reference to them. In my opinion this is a bit of a hack, but
> access can be limited by creating data that is accessible
> only by reference, so that code can reach that data only if
> it has been given a reference to it.
>
> All this is independent of the name of the variable, which
> can be created with any name you like. This program creates a
> scalar with the name "main::~" and prints it successfully.
>
> no strict;
> ${"\x7E"} = 76;
> print ${"main::~"}, "\n";
>
> I can't hope that this will help, as it will probably raise
> more questions than answers!
Lots of them too!
Thanks for the info
Dan
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