Ikegami, you're right as always. Perhaps  eval "use Foo 5.01; 1" or do { require Foo; ... } does it.

Thanks tye for clearning up that little something, it made me take a closer look at sub VERSION.

Here's an attempt to get  use Module VERSION to load the right VERSION. 
$ cat a/strict.pm
package strict;

our $VERSION = 1.04;

sub VERSION {
    my ($module, $version) = @_;
    return $VERSION unless $version;
    until ($VERSION == $version) {
        shift @INC;
        delete $INC{"strict.pm"};
        eval " require strict; 1; ";
        $VERSION = $strict::VERSION;
    }
    return $VERSION;
}

$ cat ./strict
#!/usr/bin/perl -Wl

BEGIN {

    eval {
        local @INC = @INC;
        unshift @INC, qw|a b c|;
        eval " 
            use strict 1.03 qw|subs vars refs|; 
            1; 
        ";
        warn "$@" if $@;
    };
}

print "strict using $INC{'strict.pm'} version $strict::VERSION ";

$ ./strict 

strict using /usr/share/perl/5.8/strict.pm version 1.03

[download]
It's kludgy and noisy but it works.

In reply to Re^3: BEGIN and compile-time by Firefly258
in thread BEGIN and compile-time by jbert

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