I decided to run this test script under various versions of Perl.

@examples = split /\n/, <<'EXAMPLES';
sin / ...
time / ...
localtime / ...
caller / ...
eof / ...
use constant FOO => 35; FOO / ...
use Fcntl qw(LOCK_SH); LOCK_SH / ...
sub no_args (); sub no_args{1}; no_args / ...
sub one_arg ($); sub one_arg{1}; one_arg / ...
sub normal (@); sub normal{1}; normal / ...
EXAMPLES
for (@examples) {
    s=\.\.\.=25 ; # / ; die "this dies!";=;
    local($a) = eval;
    $a = $@ if $@;
    print "$_\n\t$a\n";
}
[download]

I don't know what the results would be for earlier versions, but from Perl 5.6 onwards it's pretty consistent.

Example	5.006	5.008	5.010
sin	dies	dies	dies
time	49274891.72	49274891.74	49274891.76
localtime	dies	dies	dies
caller	dies	dies	dies
eof	dies	dies	dies
FOO	1.4	1.4	1.4
LOCK_SH	dies	dies	0.04
no_args	dies	dies	dies
one_arg	dies	dies	dies
normal	dies	dies	dies

Most of the "dies" instances also produced this message: Warning: Use of "XXX" without parentheses is ambiguous at (eval N) line 1. However, the LOCK_SH example never generated errors, while the last three generated "Prototype mismatch" messages. I must also note that almost all of the examples generated warnings, despite using neither the '-w' option or 'use strict;'

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