"use strict" and formats

[mrider]

First off, I know that formats are not the preferred method for formatting text. What can I say, mea culpa.

However, I recently ran into a situation where the easiest way to go from problem to solution, on a one-use-script, was to use a format. However, I ran into the problem that I had to comment out "use strict" in order to get my code to compile. At least I had this problem if I used a format name other than "STDOUT"...

Is there something I am missing? Consider the following trivial code. Is there some way to use both the format and to get "use strict" to work?

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

my $text1 = "A";
my $text2 = "B";
$~ = COLUMNS;
write;

exit;

format COLUMNS =
@<<<<<<@>>>>>>>
$text1,$text2
.