Now I will admit a little secret. The second method in your original post would work under 
    no strict 'vars';
    no warnings 'once';

[download]

Without strict, if a variable '$state' is not already declared, perl will automatically declare a package variable '$state'. Of course this variable would not be defined so perl would assign your '1' to $mystate. This could lead to a very subtle bug if in the future you ever tried to declare a lexical variable '$state'. It is legal to have two variables with the same name. Hard to tell which one perl will think you mean.

Bill

In reply to Re^3: detecting an undefined variable by BillKSmith
in thread detecting an undefined variable by LloydRice

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