Works for me without any problems (Perl 5.8.0). What Perl version are you talking about?

However, I found in perldoc perldelta the following explaining changing:

o The long deprecated uppercase aliases for the string comparison operators (EQ, NE, LT, LE, GE, GT) have now been removed.

under the section DEPRECATIONS. Thus, upgrading your Perl will remove the problem :-)

Greetings,
Janek