It's for that reason that you can write my $x = 10; { my $x = $x; print $x } and get 10.

Ah. This makes the behaviour of the attribute handler make sense. Hadn't thought of that. It does mean that the documentation in attributes is an oversimplification when it says:

      my ($x,@y,%z) : Bent = 1;
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is equivalent to

        use attributes ();
        my ($x,@y,%z);
        attributes::->import(__PACKAGE__, \$x, 'Bent');
        attributes::->import(__PACKAGE__, \@y, 'Bent');
        attributes::->import(__PACKAGE__, \%z, 'Bent');
        ($x,@y,%z) = 1;
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because things like this DWIM:

      my ($x,@y,%z) : Bent = (@y);
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Right then. With the attribute issue out of the way - I'm still confused why INIT can see everything. Since you can also see everything in CHECK and END blocks, which are run after compilation, I still don't understand what is going on.