Even the least ambiguous object invocation fails here: perl -e "use CGI; $q= CGI::->new(); open CGI,'<cgi'" with the same error.

As far as I'm concerned, the first lesson here is Don't give your modules all-uppercase names, especially short ones. One of the changes for CGI is that it should be renamed Net::CGI.

I'm sick of not knowing whether someone is talking about C.G.I. or CGI.pm, CPAN.org or CPAN.pm, etc. B.pm and O.pm are just plain horrid names. And so on.

But, until that mess gets cleaned up (I won't hold my breath), realize that bareword file handles have been a problem forever and this is just one more reason to avoid them.

A third lesson is that all-uppercase tokens are now pretty heavily used by Perl and so you should always use mixed case in things you declare yourself that don't require a line-noise designator. That is, variable names are not a problem but function names and anything barewordish should be in mixed case these days.

        - tye (but my friends call me "Tye")