Why is get defined inside of up?

Anyways, in addition to the other suggestions that you have been offered, I tend to use lazy memoization as follows:

{
  my $foo;

  sub up {
    unless (defined)($foo)) {
      $foo = 1;
    }
    $foo++;
  }

  sub get {
    $foo;
  }
}
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And now the initialization happens when the subroutine is called. (This is a very handy pattern when the variable takes some work to create - eg for a database handle - and you may or may not need it.)