Question

I am stuck on chapter 4 exercise 4 page 78 of Learning Perl 6th Edition. I copied the code example for the problem from page 301. I am using Perl version 5.10.1 on Ubuntu 11.04. I get errors that I cannot figure out could someone please help? I will list the code and the error message below.

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

greet( 'Fred' );
greet( 'Barney' );

sub greet {
  state $last_person;

  my $name = shift;

  print "Hi $name! ";

  if( defined $last_person ) {
      print "$last_person is also here!\n";
 }
  else {
      print "You are the first one here!\n";
}
  $last_person = $name;
}


Global symbol "$last_person" requires explicit package name at ./ex4-4 line 8.
Global symbol "$last_person" requires explicit package name at ./ex4-4 line 14.
Global symbol "$last_person" requires explicit package name at ./ex4-4 line 15.
Global symbol "$last_person" requires explicit package name at ./ex4-4 line 20.
Execution of ./ex4-4 aborted due to compilation errors.

Answer 1

From the manual:

Beginning with perl 5.9.4, you can declare variables with the state
keyword in place of my. For that to work, though, you must have
enabled that feature beforehand, either by using the feature pragma,
or by using -E on one-liners. (see feature)