in reply to Perl 5.005_03ism?

Modulenames should be capitalized, otherwise Perl tries to treat them as pragmata and if such a pragma doesn't exist, sees the modulename as a bareword.

From perldoc perlmod:

Module names are also capitalized unless they're functioning as pragmas;
pragmas are in effect compiler directives, and are sometimes called
"pragmatic modules" (or even "pragmata" if you're a classicist).