Excellent tutorial for me(newbie)
and yes Hugo, your example made it clear for me as I wrote out your example

use strict;

sub foo {
   print "\$a is ", defined($a) ? $a : 'undef', $/;
   print "\$b is ", defined($b) ? $b : 'undef', $/;
}


print "Just before start of scope\n";
{
  print "Just after start of scope\n";
  my $a = 1;
  local $b = 1;
  print "a=$a, b=$b\n";
  foo();
  print "Just before end of scope\n";
}
print "Just after end of scope\n";
print "\$a is ", defined($a) ? $a : 'undef', $/;
print "\$b is ", defined($b) ? $b : 'undef', $/;
[download]

Couple other questions/comments
1)using input record separator as newline indicator is very interesting. Never seen it before but works well. Any reason?
I am assuming it's just a style issue?
2)Below code from tutorial does not work when I insert my next to variable.. can someone explain this?

[root@myserver tmp]# cat -n !$
cat -n ./per_begin.pl1
     1  #!/usr/bin/perl -w
     2
     3  use strict;
     4
     5
     6  my $x = "original state";
     7
     8  sub foo {
     9      print " \$x is: $x\n";
    10  } 
    11
    12  { # beginning of lexical scope
    13
    14      local $x = "altered state";
    15      foo();
    16      
    17  } # end of lexical scope
    18  print "\$x is: $x\n";
[root@myserver tmp]# ./!$
././per_begin.pl1
Can't localize lexical variable $x at ././per_begin.pl1 line 14.
[download]

3)can someone explain further on "lexical variables are declared at compile-time, not initialised?
Is this because BEGIN runs during compile-time? I sneaked in a new my $foo = something inside of BEGIN
block and execution of the code came out w/ foo is something during BEGIN phase

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