The difference has probably been caused by the fact that local and my were implemented at different times, and so local takes a list expression, while my is restricted to just plain unqualified variable names. In addition local is more flexible than my, since my only allows unqualified variables, whilst local allows things like hash elements (more than just variables anyways). 

--
integral, resident of freenode's #perl

In reply to Re: Embedded variable assignments inside local declarations by integral
in thread Embedded variable assignments inside local declarations by Wibble

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