Re: What is the significance of a package

[muba]

in reply to What is the significance of a package

One important feature is that packages give you namespaces. Entries with identical names can co-exist because they live in different namespaces. As to demonstrate:

### my-perl-script.pl
use strict;
use warnings;
use Bar;

use subs qw(foo);
foo;


sub foo {
    print "Foo, from the main package.\n";
}

### Bar.pm
package Bar;
use strict;
use warnings;


sub foo {
    print "Also foo, but this comes from the Bar package.\n";
    print "(And no, if my wife calls, I'm not at the bar!)\n";
}

Try to do this without packages, and Perl will rightfully complain, "Subroutine foo redefined at ...". Which is hardly ever what you want.