I believe that in this case, the import is skipped, so: use 5.004; is the same as BEGIN { require 5.004 }

You want to check inside a begin block, anyway, so you do as little as possible with the wrong Perl.

Note also that the version number could have more information; 5.6.1 is encoded as 5.006001 in $]. If you care about 5.6.0 vs 5.6.1, you need to multiply by 1000000 first and compare with the right number.