1.3 Namespaces

A namespace is implemented as a table containing the names of the variables and subroutines in a program. The table itself is called a symbol table and is used by the running program to keep track of variable values and subroutine definitions as the program evolves. A namespace and a symbol table are essentially the same thing. A namespace exists under the hood for many programs, especially those in which only one default namespace is used.

Large programs often accidentally use the same variable name for different variables in different parts of the program. These identically named variables may unintentionally interact with each other and cause serious, hard-to-find errors. This situation is called namespace collision . Separate namespaces are one way to avoid namespace collision.

The package declaration described in the next section is one way to assign separate namespaces to different parts of your code. It gives strong protection against accidentally using a variable name that's used in another part of the program and having the two identically-named variables interact in unwanted ways.

1.3.1 Namespaces Compared with Scoping: my and use strict

The unintentional interaction between variables with the same name is enough of a problem that Perl provides more than one way to avoid it. You are probably already familiar with the use of my to restrict the scope of a variable to its enclosing block (between matching curly braces {}) and should be accustomed to using the directive use strict to require the use of my for all variables. use strict and my are a great way to protect your program from unintentional reuse of variable names. Make a habit of using my and working under use strict .