As a way of illustrating this point, here's the OP's first code block after being run through perl -MO=Deparse buggy.pl:

if (die '4') {
    ();
}
[download]

The B::Deparse module (called by the above command) shows you the Perl equivalent of what the interpreter sees at runtime. This is extremely useful for finding this "compile-time vs. run-time" class of behaviors.