My knowledge of Perl doesn't go back to pre-lexical days, so I don't know for sure, but I doubt it. Maybe that should be local $loopvar;?

As I thought I made clear, I'm just trying to interpret what I see in code and comments to piece together a possible scenario for how the current situation came about. Ie. It's all supposition and sourcecode forensics founded upon my inability to see any reasoning by which it would have been explicitely architected to operate this way.