The so-called “naked” block is one without a keyword or condition. That is, suppose you start with a while loop, which looks something like this:

while (condition) {
    body;
    body;
    body;
}

Now, take away the while keyword and the conditional expression, and you’ll have a naked block:

{
    body;
    body;
    body;
}

The naked block is like a while or foreach loop, except that it doesn’t loop; it just executes the body of the loop once, and it’s done. It’s an un-loop!

You’ll see in a while that there are other uses for the naked block, but one of its features is that it provides a scope for temporary lexical variables:

{
    print "Please enter a number: ";
    chomp(my $n = <STDIN>);
    my $root = sqrt $n;  # calculate the square root
    print "The square root of $n is $root.\n";
}