Why not start with $x = 0, and then pre-increment instead of post-incrementing $x? In other words, ++$x, instead of $x++.

Indeed. In fact it's also worth reminding incidentally that {pre,post}-{increment,decrement} behave intelligently by first of all not complaining under warnings and, in the case of post-ones, to "coerce to numeric value", that is, to return 0:

errol:~ [19:01:32]$ perl -wMstrict -le 'my $x; print map $x++, (1) x 3
+'
012
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