One could also use forward slashes.

That's right.  It's even better actually, because in contrast to using single quotes and backslashes, you don't need to remember to take care of the special case when you have a path with a trailing separator, e.g.

my $dir = 'c:\perl\scripts\';   # wrong
my $dir = 'c:\perl\scripts\\';  # ok when last backslash is escaped

vs.

my $dir = 'c:/perl/scripts/';   # ok
my $dir = "c:/perl/scripts/";   # ok
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