Hi every body,
          I am a pretty lazy programmer and after figuring out the basics of perl, i never got around to picking up good programming practices. One of the effects of this is that i never used 'use strict' in my codes..
          Anyways when i decided to start doing it and did so. But i got a problem in a code that i was trying out because of 'use strict'.
        My code looks something like this..

use strict;
....
....
domainlist();
...
sub domainlist
{
  ...
   while  (...)
   {
     ....
      my @domains;
     ....
     ....  
    }
}

When i tried running this, i got an error message saying "global symbol @domains requires explicit package name"

I tried fiddiling around with the code and found that putting the declaration of @domains outside the while loop solves the problem..
     The code works now. But can anyone tell me why i had this problem? Does having an array declaration inside a while loop cause problems? I am also using another scalar variable that is declared inside the while loop,  but no problems with that.. why?

thanks in advance,
avinash

Its a scoping problem. When you use "strict" and declare variables with "my" within a block of code, meaning whats between the curly brackets, the variable is only "visible" within that block of code:

while {
 this is the block
}

That is the scope of the variable. It is very common, and often necessay, to declare some variables outside a block of code that you will do something with inside a block of code but need access to the variable outside the block of code that does something with the variable. For example:

my @array = ();
foreach my $key (keys %hash){
  push @array, $hash{$key};
}
print "$_\n" for @array;

If you never used strict and were always using global variables you probably did not pass variables into and out of subroutines either. That is something that becomes necessay when using strict. A very simple example:

my $foo = 1;
$foo = add_one($foo);
sub add_one {
  my $foo = $_[0];
  $foo++;
  return($foo);
}  

$foo inside and $foo outside the block are not the same variable.

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