It seems Exporter (which Readonly, and many, many, many, many other modules use internally) has a weird feature (in my opinion a misfeature) where it does its own module version number checking.
Normally when you write:
use Module 1.23;
... perl will catch the version number, and not treat it as an argument to Module->import, instead passing it to Module->VERSION to act as a version number check.
However, it seems Exporter makes an attempt to catch number-like arguments that perl has missed, and do its own version checking with them. Notice the difference between the following two examples; the first one where the version check is done by perl, and the second where it's done by Exporter.pm
$ perl -e'use Carp 100 ()'
Carp version 100 required--this is only version 1.26 at -e line 1.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at -e line 1.
$ perl -e'use Carp () => 100'
Carp version 100 required--this is only version 1.26 at /home/tai/perl
+5/perlbrew/perls/perl-5.16.2/lib/5.16.2/Exporter/Heavy.pm line 120.
BEGIN failed--compilation aborted at -e line 1.
In your original example, this line:
use Readonly my $unprintable => 0x15;
... is run as:
use Readonly undef => 0x15;
... because the variable is undefined. So Exporter's version number check kicks in, even though the 0x15 was clearly never intended as a module version number.
Yet another reason to avoid using Exporter and use something sane like Sub::Exporter.
package Cow { use Moo; has name => (is => 'lazy', default => sub { 'Mooington' }) } say Cow->new->name
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