I have to admit, I hate the idea of the trailing ::.

If you're enumerating the ways to quote things in Perl, don't forget HERE docs:

<<HERE              # Double quoted
<<"HERE"            # Double quoted, explicit.
<<'HERE'            # Single quoted, explicit.
<<\HERE             # Single quoted, uncommonly used.
<<`HERE`            # Same as qx or ``.
<<~HERE             # Double quoted, indented.
<<~"HERE"           # Double quoted, indented.
<<~'HERE'           # Single quoted, indented.
<<~\HERE            # Single quoted, indented, uncommonly used (I'll b
+et you could grep all of CPAN and not find this).
<<~`HERE`           # Same as qx / ``, indented.
[download]

Which made me think, too bad we don't have:

<<~/HERE/x           # Regexp object, indented, multi-line freeform (/
+x modifier).
[download]