I was ignorantly cut-and-pasting; thanks for clarifying why the idiom is useful for ExtUtils::MakeMaker but not for most uses.

I considered mentioning the quotes, but didn't, because I thought that Perl determined the ‘purpose’ of a scalar when it was used, not when it was created. As you point out, I was wrong: 

$ perl -MDevel::Peek -e 'Dump "0.08"; Dump 0.08'
SV = PV(0x80306c) at 0x800cc0
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (POK,READONLY,pPOK)
  PV = 0x205700 "0.08"\0
  CUR = 4
  LEN = 8
SV = NV(0x812e00) at 0x800c6c
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (NOK,READONLY,pNOK)
  NV = 0.08

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In reply to Re^3: eval $VERSION in modules? by JadeNB
in thread eval $VERSION in modules? by ennuikiller

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