That should be easy to check:

perl -MO=Deparse -le '$a = "foo"'
-e syntax OK

$a = 'foo';
[download]

That was converted to singel quotes. What if we stick in something that can be interpolated ?

perl -MO=Deparse -le '$a = "foo $$"'
-e syntax OK

$a = "foo $$";
[download]

Wee, doublequotes. So indeed, it seems perl does its share of compiletime optimizations.

-- Autark.