use round brackets around your if statement.

No. Not needed.

without the brackets it's probably testing (if $name),

That doesn't make any sense.

and there's nothing to bind the substitution to...

And neither does that.

Please, when answering a question, don't make wild guesses that can easily be verified (run it through -c -MO=Deparse, and you'll see you're not making any sense). Giving bad answers actually decreases the value of Perlmonks. Running the code through -c -MO=Deparse would have taken less time than typing in the answer - and hence would have saved you time. Would have saved me time as well.