my, in this context, is of course an erroneous “bareword.”

Not at all. In Perl, declarations can simply used as expressions, they return the variables they declare.

If my was a bareword here, it would violate the "no two terms in a row" rule: 

$ perl -ce '"my" $y'
Scalar found where operator expected at -e line 1, near ""my" $y"
        (Missing operator before  $y?)

[download]

It is perfectly legal to write things like 

say my $x = 5;

[download]

Which declares variable $x, returns its value, and then prints it, followed by a newline.

I don't see the reason for using such a declaration in the if-statement without any initialization (it will always be undef), but it is perfectly legal.

Perl 6 - second systems done right

In reply to Re: My, what is "my" doing here? by moritz
in thread My, what is "my" doing here? by locked_user sundialsvc4

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.