but complaining that a certain unnamed hypothetical test suite seems big to you is just as silly as complaining that you used string eval in a certain unnamed hypothetical production program.

My point was that test suites constitute an important part of a production development, even though they may not run on production machines. They consitute a significant part of the development effort. But the prevelant idiom, the use of Test::*, applies different standards to the two sides of projects.

1. String eval is the underlying basis of what the Test::* modules do.
2. If you encountered the level of c&p coding that exist in most Test::* test suites, in production code, you would (rightly) be up in arms about it.
3. If you encountered a (say) config file validation scheme in production code that did:

   warn 'Line 1 of config file invalid' if $line[ 0 ] ne '[Section 1]';
   warn 'Line 2 of config file invalid' if $line[ 1 ] =~ m[^filename:(\S+
   +)] and -e $1;
   warn ....
   [download]

   For 400 lines, you'd probably question the methodology used.

That doesn't mean I want to throw a novice head-first into the whole debate...

How many novices have responded in this thread? Where else should such debate take place? Or perhaps you feel that no debate on this subject is called for?