However Perl::Tidy does a usually acceptable job of figuring out Perl syntax.

Uggh, it's a bit shortsighted that there's no built-in function for this. However, after playing a bit, I've found that this can be simulated without having to actually execute the scalar's contents by pre-pending "return;" and testing with eval:

sub syntax_ok {
        my $source = "return;\n" . shift;
        eval $source;
        return 1 unless $@;
        return 0;
}
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Thanks!

Bad idea... try it with this:

syntax_ok(qq{BEGIN { print "yay\n"; }});
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and you'll see that the BEGIN block still gets run, bypassing your return statement. So I'd consider it rather unsafe.