Yeah, I understand that it's old code. But "our" was introduced when, Perl 5.8 maybe? And "my" pretty much came with Perl 5. So where did the idiom come from? What book, what website, what teacher is promoting it? The idea came from somewhere, or a misinterpretation of an idea that came from somewhere. ;)

It would never have been considered a "best practice" for variables that need to be lexically scoped to a subroutine in any version of Perl since Perl 5.