And why are you limiting your thinking that way? Do you take it for granted that Perl works perfectly. Are you under some illusion that you actually have a clue how Perl works?

Did you know that /California/ will match faster against a long string than /Cali/? Do you have a clue why?

Perl 5.6.0 has a bug. The following prints 10 instead of 210. Do you have a clue what could possibly cause this? Do you have any idea what is going on inside of Perl here?

my $x = 10;
$x = '2' . $x;
print $x + 0;
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Right now Damian Conway and I have been trying to puzzle out a bug in the development release of Perl. It appears to be a bug in Perl. What, we have no idea. What are you going to do with a bug which really is not in your script? I say that advisably. When I throw in:

require Data::Dumper;
print Dumper(\%call_info);
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inside a function and it not only does not print but jumps out of several layers of functions, something is seriously wrong with Perl.

There is nothing, zero, zilch, nada special about programming scripts and modules that suggests that due diligence there is any more important than at other levels in the tool-chain. The only difference is that you think you understand what is happening there so you can go into your faux-paranoia and refuse to use code which was probably written by people who are far more competent than you.

And even if you are a better programmer, they probably know more about the problem domain that they are working with than you do. Besides which fresh code is by nature more prone to bugs than tested code.

In short, I absolutely agree with clemburg. You either are a hopeless wreck or you use things that you don't understand all of the time, and by claiming to refuse to do so you are demonstrating your ignorance. If you refuse to use that you have not personally audited merely because it is at a level you can try to figure out, then you are being ridiculous.

By all means audit the code, figure out how it works. Find bugs. Fix and report them. Don't use stuff once you have good reason to think it is buggy. But don't pull this he-programmer silliness, you aren't good enough. Perhaps if your name was Theo de Raadt I might respect it. But you are not.