To be honest I dont buy this skilled person argument. I do a lot of perl. Occassionally I leave it out of my code and then get bitten. Every time. When I have strange results its the first thing I check.

I personally would have no problem if the input boxes came preloaded with the code block AND a nice

use warnings; 
use strict;
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Honestly I think I agree with the perldocs that it is a bug that perl does not have these set by default, as you can always negate them as in the infamous

no strict 'refs';
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Even the old hands from what Ive seen in the modules work under strict and warnings, and probably wouldnt mind much at all if they were present.
Yves