The more I think about the “single-quote as alternate package separator” thing I mentioned in my last post, the more it bothers me. The problem I ran into, trying to print "$user's crontab is missing!

", generated an “uninitialized value” warning. It did NOT get picked up by strict mode—which was on—because packaged-qualified variables are always OK.

This strikes me as a source of hard-to-find and relatively easy-to-generate bugs. Given all the other stuff that has been deprecated out of Perl over the years, I am surprised this hasn’t been tagged for deprecation. Especially given that, according to a comment from preaction, the single-quote as a package separator was considered archaic as of Perl 5.6.