[MacPerl] Problem with MacPerl 5.06

[schinder@pjstoaster.pg.md.us (Paul Schinder)]

I've run across a difference in behavior between MacPerl 5.06 and Perl
5.001m on a Sun workstation.  This difference has been annoying in my
attempt to get libwww-perl-5b6 to work on my Mac, so I wrote a little
test code to demonstrate the problem.  Since I want to make sure that
it's not something on my Mac (Powerbook 165, 7.5.1) but is or is not a
problem with MacPerl, I'm sending this to the list rather than to
Matthias directly.

The two files are short, so I'm not going to bother MIME'ing them

test.pl:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
package test;

#$a = "test";
#my $a = "test";
local $a = "test";

sub test {my $b = $a;return $b};
1;

testmain.pl:

#!/usr/local/bin/perl

require "test.pl";

$a = test::test();
print "$test::a, $a\n";

Running testmain with the declaration line in test changed gives the following

             MacPerl 5.06                     Sun Perl 5.001m
$a:            test, test                        test, test
local $a:          ,                                 ,
my $a:             ,                                 , test


The latter is what's been the problem with lwp5b6, because the authors
universally declare variables "my" outside of routines, and MacPerl
promptly forgets their existence and initial values.  (I can get it
working simply by removing the "my", but there's a lot of them.)

So is this some bizzare problem with my setup or is it a problem with
MacPerl?
---
--------
Paul J. Schinder
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center,
Code 693, Greenbelt, MD 20771 USA
schinder@pjstoaster.pg.md.us