As I said elsewhere, but originally noted by demerphq, -e would be exempt. I don't follow you with regard to modules. As far as I am concerned, the only package that would be affected is main. People who right modules are well able to decide whether the code inside requires stric or not.

Which funnily enough is exactly the reverse of the proposal for P6--which confuses the beggebers(sp? (I don't care:)) out of me. :?

It's the guy writing his first few perl scripts that you want to catch.

As for the those modifying scripts downloaded from the web, if the code screamed a stream of "It's broken" at them, they would probably either scream back at the author or decide that it was a crap download and look elsewhere. Who knows, it might even improve a few notorious artifacts.

I agree about the inherent global nature of much of the internals, but these are much less of a problem than users setting out writing code that uses globals to pass data between subroutines, symbolic references and a mess of similar constructs that are a pain to undo once a tentatively working script needs to grow with the expectations and aspirations.

Anyway, this has all got really rather deeper than I ever intended when I first posted my late night "I wonder why that is?" question.