Should Perl boilerplate go before or after a package declaration?

Assuming there's only one package in a file, does the order or the following Perl boilerplate matter? if there are no technical reasons are t开发者_开发问答here any aesthetic?

use 5.006;
use strict;
use warnings;
package foo;

---

The order matters if any part of your boiler plate imports any subroutines or variables, or does anything tricky with the caller's namespace.

If you get into the habit of placing it before the package name, then one day when you want to add use List::Util 'reduce'; to your boiler plate, the subroutine will be imported into main instead of foo. So package foo will not have reduce imported, and you may be scratching your head for a while trying to figure out why it isn't working.

The reason why it doesn't matter with the three imports you have shown is that they are all pragmatic modules (or assertions), and their effect is lexically scoped, not package scoped. Placed at the top of the file, those pragmas will be in effect for the entire file.

---

The order doesn't matter from a technical standpoint.

It's always been my practice (and, fwiw, what's used in Perl Best Practices) to put the package declaration at the very start. I'd suggest a blank line before the package declaration if there's anything before it, to make it stand out.