Class variables

[Mohammed Khatib]

Dear Perl people,

I'm just wondering about the set up of class variables in a Perl class.
Say I have something like the following:

======================
sub new
{
    # fetch class name
    my $class = shift;

    # create object
    my $self = {
        _path => shift,
    };

    # open input definition file
    open(DEF, $self->{_path})
        or die "\n"
        . __PACKAGE__
        . ": Couldn't open definition file for reading! - "
        . $self->{_path}
        . "\n";
    
    # read in entire file
    # @def is a global variable here, global in the module only that is
    @def = <DEF>;
    
    bless $self, $class;
}

======================

Now, with the initialisation of the global @def array, is there any benefit
of initialising this array as

$self->{_def => <DEF>} instead of having an explicit global array @def?

Thanks for any advice,
Mk

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