"... ms windows ... XP in Virtualbox where the version of Perl requires &subname()"

I don't see how WinXP has any bearing on this. I have a very old laptop, that I probably only use a couple of times a year: it runs WinXP and has Perl installed. I've never had any reason to use '&subname()' for any Perl code on that machine.

I don't see the relevance of mentioning VirtualBox. I've certainly run Perl code under VirtualBox/WinXP for cross-platform testing purposes in the past: again, I've never had any reason to use '&subname()'.

What version of Perl are you running that you think requires '&subname()'?

If you run the following, do you get the the same result that I show?

$ perl -le 'sub test { 42 } print test(); print &test()'
42
42
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