RonW,
I also have a C background, and agree about "state" variables being the Perl equivalent of C "static" variables.
Using "state" simplifies cases like the following where one shouldn't have to remember to print an HTML header, but also doesn't want it more than once:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;
use warnings;
use feature qw{ state };
sub html {
my ($text) = @_;
# Make the header idempotent
state $b_header++ or print "Content-type: text/html\n\n";
print $text;
}
html("<br>This is some html, prior to which a header is printed\n");
html("<br>This is too (but the header was printed already)\n");
Output:
Content-type: text/html
<br>This is some html, prior to which a header is printed
<br>This is too (but the header was printed already)
say
substr+lc crypt(qw $i3 SI$),4,5
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