The LHS of => must be a bareword for the quoting to occur. perldata defines a bareword as "a word that has no other interpretation in the grammar".

The thing is, a bareword "will be treated as if it were a quoted string." That means => does nothing except prevent the default behaviour from being "outlawed" using use strict 'subs';.

I don't know what the wording should be, but the docs for => need fixing. Submit a patch!

In reply to Re^3: Illegal octal digit error by ikegami
in thread Illegal octal digit error by lakshmananindia

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