Hm. Let this serve as a reminder: In <5.6, qw// is slow. However, there's no reason to use qw most of the time that it's used. For example, code like use Foo qw(:bar); seems to be the de facto standard. But use Foo ':bar'; works just as well, is shorter, faster (only trivialy so in this case), and IMHO clearer.

Is this just cargo-cultism, or is there some deeper reason going on here?

Thanks,
James Mastros,
Just Another Perl Scribe