I called it a trick because it exploits undefined behaviour in the language. perl 5.10, 5.12 or some future version may or may not preserve the same behaviour, so it seems to me bad practice to promulgate it's use.

As I'm sure you know, perldoc perlsyn states:

NOTE: The behaviour of a "my" statement modified with a statement modi‐ fier conditional or loop construct (e.g. "my $x if ...") is undefined. The value of the "my" variable may be "undef", any previously assigned value, or possibly anything else. Don’t rely on it. Future versions of perl might do something different from the version of perl you try it out on. Here be dragons.

In reply to Re^5: File-scoped lexicals and eval scope? by jbert
in thread File-scoped lexicals and eval scope? by Cambo

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