in reply to Re^4: will you explain what's going on?
in thread will you explain what's going on?

Since this effect depends on how a lot of different pieces work, you won't find it easily in the source code. But the last paragraph of the section of perlsyn on statement modifiers says (beginning in 5.8.1, anyway):
NOTE: The behaviour of a my statement modified with a statement modifier 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.