Monks,

I'm finding the uncommon error Variable "%data" is not available when using the following module:

package Foo;

use warnings;
use strict;

my %data = qw/foo bar/;

our $AUTOLOAD;
sub AUTOLOAD {
    my ($self, @args) = @_;
    my ($pkg, $field) = (__PACKAGE__, $AUTOLOAD);
    $field =~ s/${pkg}:://;

    ## uncommenting any of these, makes the code work
    #%data;
    #() = %data;
    #map $_, %data;
    #map $_, \%data;
    #$::qwerty123 = %data;

    eval "*$field = sub { return \\%$field; };";
    $@ and die "eval failed: $@\n";

    goto &$field;
}

1;
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$ perl -I. -MData::Dumper -MFoo -e'print Dumper (Foo->data)'
Variable "%data" is not available at (eval 1) line 1.
$VAR1 = {};
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As a workaround, it's enough to uncomment any of the commented lines (although the first of them triggers the expected warning):

$ perl -I. -MData::Dumper -MFoo -e'print Dumper (Foo->data)'
Useless use of private hash in void context at Foo.pm line 16.
$VAR1 = {
          'foo' => 'bar'
        };
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At this point I checked perldiag, which says: "This can happen for one of two reasons. First, the outer lexical may be declared in an outer anonymous subroutine that has not yet been created. [...] The second situation is caused by an eval accessing a variable that has gone out of scope".

To me, this scenario isn't covered by either of the given explanations. I could be led to believe that the first of the reasons explains it, although then I'd like to be educated on how this module compares to an anonymous subroutine regarding the compilation-time vs run-time issues that are detailed in the documentation and result in this error.

Just for fun, I appended the following at the bottom of Foo.pm:

package main;
use warnings;
use strict;
use Data::Dumper;
print Dumper (Foo->data);
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Then, running perl Foo.pm works fine even with all those 5 lines mentioned above commented out.