I'm sorry if this may seem like a stupid question. I'm not very familiar with Perl's innards (except for a trip or two into the bizarre and surreal realm of XS), and I can't really say I understand why the whole variable referencing business is so messy, with the symbol tables and the my()s and the locals() and all. But I've implemented my share of programming languages, functional and otherwise, and closures have never been a problem.
So, is there something special about Perl's environments which makes lexical scoping a problem? While we're at it, is there a good reason why my() isn't the default inside subs?
-- Kaufmann