G'day Perl300,

++ on your report.

For command line work, consider the -E option instead of the -e option (see perlrun: Command Switches):

Equivalent to what you got without use VERSION:

$ perl -e 'say 1'
Number found where operator expected at -e line 1, near "say 1"
    (Do you need to predeclare say?)
syntax error at -e line 1, near "say 1"
Execution of -e aborted due to compilation errors.
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Equivalent to what you got using use VERSION:

$ perl -E 'say 1'
1
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I'm using:

$ perl -v

This is perl 5, version 22, subversion 0 (v5.22.0) built for darwin-th
+read-multi-2level
(with 1 registered patch, see perl -V for more detail)
...
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