Lexical vars in a closure

gistfile1.txt

#!/usr/bin/env perl

use warnings;
use strict;

{
	my %hsh = map { ($_ => 1) } qw( some costy hashmap here );
	sub has {
		return $hsh{$_[0]};
	}
};

print has('costy'), "\n";
print has('hash'), "\n";

Am I just totally mistaken, or does the sub only exist with in that block? I threw a var outside of the closure, than assigned it a reference to my internal sub so I could see it outside of that block.

Or do subs always have global scope and I'm just an idiot?

I don't know you in person, so I can't comment on that 'idiot stuff' ;)

sub's are not lexical, but package-scope. By chance, the above gist is identical to the docs' one: http://perldoc.perl.org/perlsub.html#Persistent-variables-with-closures

Ha, well thanks for the heads up. I don't know why I totally thought subs had lexical scope. I guess my solution would have worked, albeit it was far more work than needed to be done.

Subs are "global", i.e. kept in package symbol table, which you can manipulate during runtime, e.g.

sub a_gen {
    return \&a;
}

sub a { 'outer' };

say a, a_gen->(); # says outerouter

{
    no warnings 'redefine';                                                     
    local *a = sub { 'inner' };

    say a(), a_gen->(); # says innerinner
}

say a, a_gen->(); # says outerouter