Might the lead software engineer been railing against using my $var in a loop when $var already declared with use vars qw($var)? Resulting in two scalars of same name, one of which isn't even used.
I did the same on occasion, until corrected here at PM.
cheers,
Don striving for Perl Adept
Comment on RE: redeclaring variables with 'my' (use vars qw($var); and my $var ?)