Embperl: Modern Templates  Keeping Variables' Values  As you can
see, variable assignments are kept across square brackets,
meaning that you can assign a variable in one block and refer to
it later. Variables are global by default, but you can use
Perl's “my” convention to create temporary variables, which go
out of scope at the end of the block.  One of the nice things
about mod_perl is that it compiles programs once, caching them
for future invocations. Not only do you save the overhead of
forking a new process, but the program runs much faster since it
only needs to be interpreted. In many cases, you want variable
values to remain intact across several invocations of a program.
Such persistence allows you to log into a database server only
once, keeping a connection open through the duration of many
HTTP requests.  This raises the question of what happens to
variables you define in an Embperl document—do they also keep
their values across invocations, or do they disappear? The
answer is that each Embperl d