Thanks for the kind words.

The my trick is an old one that relies on a feature of my that is not documented in perldoc -f my (though my is so ubiquitous that I suspect many people have not even read that perldoc). You see, my, like most Perl functions, has a return value. It returns variable it's declaring. That allows you to do stuff like this:

chomp(my $data = <FH>);
while ((my $foo = some_func()) eq 'bar') { ... }
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You can also use it to assign values to more than one variable:

In short, were it not for this feature, Perl would lose many nifty timesavers.