I think you're finding that Perl ignores the if statement as it can never be true. When you try another combination that at least has some hope of being true, Perl will report the error:

my $foo = 1;

if ($foo eq "1") {
   print hello();
}

sub helloBROKEN {
   print "hello world\n";
}
[download]

Update: The question said compile time - doh! - thanks eg, I need to pay more attention!

Update 2: Thanks spaz! I admit I didn't deparse it so it's nice to see the confirmation.

--
I'd like to be able to assign to an luser

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