That did work, daxim. I incorporated jdkrahn's criticisms as well. I'm doing more with bliako's scripts employing Getopt::Long but will reply to his meditation. Progress is slow: lots of reading. Sometimes getting the time for an appropriate write-up is the pinch-point. Thank Markov for the rain....

I did get a primitive, working module out of this thread, but as this thread is trailing off, I would like to focus on the last question I asked:

I have now gone in and read all I could find at module source. I wish I had done this initially, as I might have patterned my source off of dylan's. One thing I find is this:

Copyright (C) 2017 by Dylan Doxey

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms as Perl itself, either Perl version 5.12.4 or,
at your option, any later version of Perl 5 you may have available.
[download]

Another is:

package WWW::Google::Translate;
 
our $VERSION = '0.10';
[download]

If I had to guess, I might think that this is the only version that has existed, but such an assessment is not made from the point of view of experience. In Makefile.PL , should I just go:

  PREREQ_PM => {
       WWW::Google::Translate              => '.1',
        
    },
[download]

and be done with it? Thanks for your comment,

If I had to guess, I might think that this is the only version that has existed, but such an assessment is not made from the point of view of experience.

The information regarding release history is available in many places, so there's no need to guess. You might try either the Changes file or the CPANTS releases tab for example.

As to which minimum version to specify, well that's up to you. Wider adoption comes from less stringent criteria but the newest versions should have fewer outstanding bugs and (as is the case here with support for the "model" parameter) more features. I would suggest that you pick one philosophy (newest available or oldest supported) and apply the same to all your dependencies for the sake of consistency.

If I had to guess, I might think that this is the only version that has existed

The changelog shows that there have been versions from 0.01 through 0.10, the most recent release being May 2017.

In Makefile.PL , should I just go: PREREQ_PM => { WWW::Google::Translate => '.1', },

I would recommend against reformatting the version number like that, as it might potentially confuse the tools that do version number comparison. Either specify '0' for "any version", or '0.10' for that version.

Since users will need to install this module from CPAN anyway, and in particular because it's a pure-Perl module without any exotic dependencies, I think it's probably fine to require a version of the module version that's ~2 years old.