I don't see Juerd thinking the two should be tied together in that thread (other than in his initial post not recognizing the possibility of <> being in use in an outer context).

That is what I meant. I didn't recognize it at a first glance, either. And I'm sure most people who are not Perl gurus would, and even some who are too.

I've localized @ARGV when calling Getopt::Long::GetOptions before. @ARGV's implicit use by <ARGV> is only a small part of what it does.

Good point but I beg to differ: @ARGV's implicit use by <ARGV> is certainly not the only thing it does, but perhaps the biggest part of it. Another one that springs to mind is shift and pop defaulting to it outside of a sub. But the fact Getopt::* modules use it does not constitute something "it does" since it doesn't belong to the sematics of the language, while those other things do!