As long as the language supports constant, my policy is not to use constant directly later in the body of the program, and I always pre-define it in the "header":

use constant C1 => 14;
use constant C2 => 9;

my $a = 'x';
if ($a eq 'x') {
   $count = C1;
}
else {
   $count = C2;
}
print $count;
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