Even if it did compile, it isn't that lethal. In fact, even if you type:

    $_ = 0x0x0xFFFFFFFF
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perl will try to allocate a large piece of memory, and unless you have the memory for it, the malloc will fail, causing Perl to quickly segfault. And even if you do have the memory, at worst you have a temporary slowdown of your system. Big deal. Far more lethal are mistypings in open:

    open my $fh => ">" => "/etc/passwd" or die; # Oops, mistyped '<'
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(assuming you're running this as root).

Abigail