As I'm a C++ guy, I always shiver when anyone says "for clarity, initialize it in a separate statement". That's the kind of thing that often works, but if you get used to it, you'll have a hell of time to debug when it fails. (That's the reason why the C-style for loop has a wierd syntax extension in C++ so you can declare and initialize the loop variable at the same place.)

Of course, perl's = is not the same as C++ =.