This question brings to mind chromatic's recent blog post on The Act of Naming. Granted, his post is about subroutine names and why you might want to create technically-superfluous subs purely for the sake of being able to name sections of your code, but the reasoning seems applicable to variables as well: Creating a new (lexical) variable with a good name is cheap, safe, and easy - cheaper and easier than the contortions demonstrated by some of the other responses' attempts to keep assigning to $_ safe - and it also helps to convey what your code is actually intended to accomplish. So JFDI.