in reply to Variable declaration optimization?

“At so-many billion operations per second, these days, no one can hear you scream.”

Just focus your attention on designing and writing your code so that it is both robust and clear.   Rely upon the things that the Perl Implementors do for you (which is, after all, constantly improving), and don’t try to “second guess” what they are up to.   Just write code that is robust and clear.