Lots of good advice in there. I'm not averse to a bunch of returns inside a sub especially if it simplifies the code and am also quite happy with my $x = shift; so long as there is only one arg being retrieved. As time goes on I am becoming less tolerant of unnecessary punctuation as I have to pause and question why it is there so that gets a big thumbs-up from me.

There's no need to eval $VERSION: $VERSION = eval $VERSION;

This was covered a few weeks ago where the original source for it was unearthed. Still not convinced of the need for massaging the version like this but if I were I would go with Haarg's approach instead - for clarity if nothing else.