I did a double take when first looking at that code -- it was immediately obvious that it was a mechanism to summon the associated balanced character for a terminator.

However, there is an identity function built in, implying that you can simply use two "closing" terminators. Which means stuff like this is correct perl:

  my $str = qw)You can quote me on this);
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It sure looks odd, but doesn't seem to break anything. Just goes to show you learn something every day.

Matt

Update: Hmmm, I forgot about the list behavior of said quoting construct. Here are some more clear examples:

@words = qw)You can quote me on this);
$str   =  q)You can quote me on this);
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