I'm surprised. :-o

You have your answers below, but I'd thought I'd post a simple example, which shows quite explictly that the 'my' does scope a variable, but doesn't re-initialise it if you have a conditional which evaluates to false.

print count() . "\n";
print count() . "\n";
print count() . "\n";

sub count {
    my $counter = 'whatever' if 0; # declare local 'static' variable
    $counter++;
}

__OUTPUT__
0
1
2
[download]

PS. Don't actually do this though