Tell the lead software engineer that Perl gurus recommend making variables available with the smallest possible declared scope. And lexical is preferred over dynamic scoping. The above code works fine in Perl from version 5.004 onwards and gives you maximal protection against accidentally using the same variable twice for two different things.

If you need to work with 5.003, then avoid. Otherwise I would recommend this style in general.

Although doing it in a while loop is not normal for me. Usually I do things like:

foreach my $thing (@list) {
    #Something interesting
}
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