At least it was a surprise to me. Here's a minimal version of the code to reproduce the issue: 
use strict;

my $foo = 1;
foo();
my $foo = 2;

sub foo {
    print "foo: $foo\n";
}

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Of course, re-my'ing the same variable isn't ideal, but the behavior surprised me. I would expect it to output "foo: 1" but it actually outputs "foo: ". It turns out that $foo is undef within the foo() function. Changing the second my: 
my $foo = 2;

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to: 
$foo = 2;

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causes it to output "foo: 1" as expected. What's going on here? I see the same thing in perl 5.8.8 and 5.10.0.

In reply to Scope surprise by smcdonald

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