Except that it does nothing of the kind. There's no difference to creating a named lexical and letting it fall out of scope versus creating an anonymous value in the first place. So, perhaps this is vestigial code, left over from a larger cut-n-paste, or this is from someone who didn't quite "get it".

In either case, I'd yellow flag this in a formal code review. Meaning I'd let it stand as workable, but if resources were available, bring it in line with more common idioms.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker