That won't be optimized away, but a constant true value (not 0, "0", "" or undef) are.
This means you can have less code and more efficiency, but still the clarity you like:

while ('forever'){
    ...
}
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Which is equivalent to while (1) { ... }, which is optimized to for (;;) { ... }.

2;0 juerd@ouranos:~$ perl -e'undef christmas'
Segmentation fault
2;139 juerd@ouranos:~$
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