Nope. Perl forgives you if you simply test or assign a bare uninitialized variable in a conditional. Your code works for this reason -- no warning for "if ($var)". Going over your post, I think this is a case where you understand but just mis-stated your assertion.

Note:

#!/usr/bin/perl -w
use strict;

my $stuff;

# No complaint here
if ($stuff) {
   print "hello\n";
}

# No complaint here
if (my $stuff2 = $stuff) {
   print "hello\n";
}

# But this interpolation causes a warning
if (my $stuff3 = "$stuff") {
   print "hello\n";
}

# This concatenation complains also
if (my $newstuff = "new $stuff") {
   print "hello\n";
}
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"Perl is a mess and that's good because the
problem space is also a mess." - Larry Wall