Using an undef variable in a mathematical operation causes its value to begin at zero. I don't see a formal explanation in perlop, but I would speculate that under warnings or -w you see the message regarding $sum2 being uninitialized because zero times anything is zero, and perl probably figures that you want to know in advance that you're performing a computation guaranteed to result in zero. Addition works because adding to zero isn't a problem. The solution therefore is to initialize $sum2 with a non-zero value.