Scope of variables in a function

[Dirk Koopman]

On 01/06/13 18:03, Hakim Cassimally wrote:
> Andy,
>
> I believe your problem is:
>
>      my $x = 'FOO' if $condition;
>
> This only declares the new variable if $condition, so it ends up having
> surprising, static-like behaviour, which you probably shouldn't rely on.
>
> Rewriting to:
>
>     my $result;
>     $result = 'FOO' if ...
>
> gives your expected result.


It is very annoying. The more so because this is an artefact that is 
(apparently) relied on by a lot of legacy code.

Quite a lot of other perl artefacts have been deprecated and then 
removed. Why does this one persist? In what way is it useful or intuitive?