I don't remember it always being that way...

You misremember. Perl 5 has worked that way for at least 12 years.

I don't remember that being required before 5.14 or maybe 5.12...

You misremember that too.

I've just given up on perl making sense and decided to code around everything that doesn't make sense -- it was too much work trying to figure out the 'why's....

The hows and whys have been in the documentation for years. Several people in this thread have tried to explain this to you. You will continue to struggle unless you decide to believe us.

So how does one tell Perl, in code that looks like perl code, and not some sort of assembler, that a 'use statement' should not go searching for files, but should use the 'in-memory' version instead?

You do so the same way you tell Perl that sort should load files and grep should shell out to Nethack. In other words, fundamental Perl 5 operations behave as they have been documented and implemented and tested and stable since the earliest versions of Perl 5.

You are working against Perl and doing things the hard way and your problems reflect that. You have trouble debugging your code because you're doing things the hard way. Why are you continually asking for advice and ignoring that advice?

In reply to Re^5: Correct syntax for using $INC to keep modules in same file by chromatic
in thread can't import using exporter by perl-diddler

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