You can do bare braces in perl5 too, I used the 'do { ... }' block because that's an expression rather than a statement so I could return the subroutine -

  my $code;
  {
    my $count = 0;
    $code = sub { ++$count };
  }

would've been equivalent but I always try and do assign-once-at-declaration-time where possible because mutable state is my mortal enemy.