What are common pitfalls or gotchas with state variables?

State variables in Perl can introduce complexities that developers should be aware of. Here are some common pitfalls or gotchas:

• Unintended persistence: State variables preserve their values across multiple calls, which may lead to unexpected behaviors if not managed carefully.
• Global scope: State variables are accessible from anywhere in the package, which can lead to conflicts or unintended overwrites.
• Initialization: Users may forget to initialize state variables, leading to undefined behavior until they are explicitly set.
• Thread safety: State variables are not thread-safe unless explicitly managed, which can cause data corruption in multi-threaded applications.
• Debugging difficulties: Tracking the state of variables can become challenging, especially in larger applications where many functions access the same state variable.