Ingy seems to have found a use for it.

Okay. That's different. He's dumping the hash into the file using Data::Dumper which ensures everything is fully quoted etc. and avoids having to mess with the escaping he'd have to do if he tried to produce the list manually as a part of a heredoc.

Though he could have done this (Note: '(' and ')' in the heredocs and no backslash in the Dumper call):

    print MF <<END;
use ExtUtils::MakeMaker;
my %options = (       
END

    local $Data::Dumper::Terse = 1;
    local $Data::Dumper::Indent = 1;
    print MF Data::Dumper::Dumper( %options);

    print MF <<END;
);
WriteMakefile(\%options);

# Remove the Makefile dependency. Causes problems on a few systems.
sub MY::makefile { '' }
END
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