contrary to popular belief, this is a good thing. strict causes a performance hit of around 30%, which is something a performance-oriented module like CGI would like to avoid.

i believe what you're seeing is optimized perl, which is not to be mistaken for maintainable perl. i trust the CGI experts who keep this module up to date to do their job, and at the same time hope i'm never called on to debug that mess and make an update.

~Particle *accelerates*