what is the purpose of this declaration?

IF you had multiple packages in one file;
then this would be useful for a file-global variable (the lexical scope)

but what other function does it fulfill?

what does it mean that it does not CREATE a local variable?
is the namespace reserved in the symbol table, but no memory has been allocated for it?
isn't that what my does?

my $var;
    isn't both a symbol table entry created
    and memory allocated?

our $var;
    only a symbol table entry?
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also it's wierd that you can declare a variable OUR as well as MY

package packA;
use strict;
our $ourVAR;

$ourVAR = "123 ABC";
print "  packA  ourVAR  = $ourVAR \n";
my $ourVAR = "456 RST";
print "  packAA  ourVAR = $ourVAR \n";
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and sure enough, ourVAR gets the new value.
so what am i missing? :-)