if behaves similar to for in this respect.

Yes good point. I always forget about that, too... sometimes you'd like to have the loop counter defined after the loop is over, but you have to make a special effort to do that. This won't work, for example:

my @list = qw( wuhn tew thuree foah DONE whateva you know);
for my $i (0..10) {
  last if ($list[$i] eq 'DONE');
}
print "final index: $i\n";
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Somewhat surprisingly then, this does not work:

print $t if (my $t = shift);
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Well, I wouldn't say that that's exactly a surprise -- after all, it's a fairly odd thing to do, declaring it's a lexical after you use it... This doesn't work either:

$t = shift;
print $t;
my $t;
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