Perl has been able to use plain strings as regexes for as long as I know. Usually that is intended to be used as 
$pat = 'fo.d';
$s =~ $pat

[download]
but what you got here is just a weird case of pretty much the same, and as such, works too, for some meaning of "work".

Do note that using // or "" as delimiters is not the same thing. One's a regex, the other a string. Oh, and using m with quotes as delimiter, makes it a regex again. Witness the difference: 

#! perl -w
$\ = "\n";  # one line per print
$s = "abc\\.def";
print $s;
$s =~ /(\\.)/ and print $1;
$s =~ "(\\.)" and print $1;
$s =~ m"(\\.)" and print $1;

[download]
resulting in: 
abc\.def
\.
.
\.

In reply to Re: Naked quotes work like m//? by bart
in thread Naked quotes work like m//? by samtregar

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