I'm not surprised you are confused:) I get the same behaviour with AS 5.8.

This isn't a bug, and what's more it is a doosy. I'm amazed I didn't recognise this as the normal behaviour of while. this hasn't shown up earlier. Actually I did, after trying to sleep for about 2 hours later. D'oh. It's the heat.

The problem lies with the while statement. Somehow, the aliasing of the input to $_ is getting mixd up with the first element of @_. This can be seen by printing the contents of the array just before the while and again inside it. Inside the loop, the first element of the array has been overwritten by the input from the diamond operator. At the end of the while loop, this then gets set to null. The original contents have been blown away!!

#!perl -sw
use strict;
$^W=0;

my @instances = ('a', 'b', 'c');

sub screwed {
    my ($in) = @_;
    open(IN, '<', $in);
    print "before while: @instances\n";
#    while(local $_ = <IN>) {
    while(<IN>) {
        chomp;
        print "after while: @instances\n";
        print "file $in contains $_\n";
    }
    close(IN);
}


print "before $_\n" for @instances;
screwed $_ for @instances;
print "after $_\n" for @instances;
__END__
P:\test>test
before a
before b
before c
before while: a b c
after while: a1 b c
file a contains a1
after while: a2 b c
file a contains a2
before while:  b c
after while:  b1 c
file b contains b1
after while:  b2 c
file b contains b2
before while:   c
after while:   c1
file c contains c1
after while:   c2
file c contains c2
after while:   c3
file c contains c3
after
after
after
[download]

A work around is to explicitly localise $_ in the while as shown commented out above.

I'll raise a perlbug against this.