I was going to answer question one by suggesting that it might be more useful to think of my as a compile-time scoping contruct rather than something that actually gets executed. So I wrote some sample code to illustrate my point. I guess it was a useful excercise, because now I'm confused! Here are the three scripts and their outputs:
use strict;
foreach (0 .. 10) {
  my $foo;
  $foo = 0 unless $_;
  print $foo++, ' ';
}

0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0

use strict;
foreach (0 .. 10) {
  my $foo = 0 unless $_;
  print $foo++, ' ';
}

0 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

use strict;
foreach (0 .. 10) {
  my $foo = 0 unless $_;
  print $foo, ' ';
  $foo++
}

0  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

[download]
Okay, I was wrong about the not-getting-executed stuff. But can anyone explain what's going on with the second and third examples? It's almost as if the scope of the my were restricted to the statement it's used in and that the $foo getting printed and incremented is a different variable -- at least after the first time through the loop (if that even makes sense). But if that were the case, why didn't strict complain?

In reply to Re: Two Questions on "my" by Dr. Mu
in thread Two Questions on "my" by C_T

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