last modified 2011-03-07 18:01

I was happy to learn about this bizarre flag in Perl, even though it took a lot of aggravation to learn it.

All code snippets below should be assumed to include strictures.

BEGIN { package Source; use Exporter 'import'; our @EXPORT = qw(*var); our $var = 10; } package Destination; BEGIN { Source->import; } print $var;

The program above prints 10. This is probably not surprising to anyone. We have some package, Source , which exports its var symbol, which has 10 in its scalar value. Destination imports that symbol and prints it. Because the symbol was imported, we don't have to fully-qualify the name or declare it with our .

What Exporter does is a simple glob assignment, like this:

*Destination::var = *Source::var;

...so it should be easy to take Exporter out of the equation:

BEGIN { package Source; our $var = 10; } package Destination; BEGIN { *Destination::var = *Source::var; } print $var;

This blows up!

Variable "$var" is not imported at - line 10. Global symbol "$var" requires explicit package name at - line 10. Execution of - aborted due to compilation errors.

Well, we never had to declare when it was imported, and why is it bringing up importing anyway? We did exactly the same thing!

Well, it turns out there's a tiny difference...

BEGIN { package Source; our $var = 10; } package Destination; BEGIN { package Source; # <----- that is really, really important *Destination::var = *Source::var; } print $var;

If a glob in your package has a value because it was assigned from outside the package, the variable is marked with the flag GVf_IMPORTED and you can use it without a declaration even under strict. If it was assigned within your package, you need to declare. I used Source for the assigning package in the sample above, but it can be anything other than the destination package. For example, when you use Exporter, the assignment happens in Exporter::Heavy.

Amusingly enough, this is how use vars works. When you say:

package X; use vars qw($foo @bar);

...it is equivalent to:

BEGIN { package vars; *X::foo = \$X::foo; *X::bar = \@X::bar; }

Really! Go read the source.

This seems like a weird way for this to work, and like it was a hack added for one purpose and abused for another. I'd hoped to find an explanation of the reasoning for it, but the flag entered perl's source code in a massive commit apparently reconstructed from four months of changes in 1994. (It's commit a0d0e21ea6ea90a22318550944fe6cb09ae10cda).