[oak perl] operator question--still confused

[Sandy Santra]

Thanks for the responses, folks.  That was a lot of good 
info...unfortunately over my head somewhat.

My problem doesn't involve a loop, merely understanding how "use strict" 
and "my" are supposed to work together.  I may have copied my examples 
incorrectly (sorry!), so they are set forth again here below.  I started 
out with:

my @numbers = qw(1 4 6);
$total += $_ for @numbers;
print $total;

which worked, producing a value of "11" to my DOS window.  Then I decided 
to add "use strict;" at the beginning:

use strict;
my @numbers = qw(1 4 6);
$total += $_ for @numbers;
print $total;

That gave me errors, asking me to explicitly define $total (I assume with 
"my").  But when I run the following, I get nothing (no return of the value 
and no error messages):

use strict;
my @numbers = qw(1 4 6);
my $total += $_ for @numbers;
print $total;

I can't figure out why my first example works, whereas my third doesn't.  I 
figure this is just something simple I'm missing.



--Sandy Santra