AutoLoader and '+~'

Today I noticed that on my Linux work computers running Perl 5.8.5 and 
5.8.6, the following produced a listing of the subdirectories of my home 
directory:
$ perl -e 'use PDL::AutoLoader; print join " ", 
PDL::AutoLoader::expand_path("+~");'
But on my Linux home computer running Perl 5.8.8, it produced no 
output.  Manually substituting /home/derek for the ~ produced the 
desired output.  Why would tilde expansion work on one system and not 
another?  All machines are running PDL 2.4.3.  I looked through the "man 
perldelta"s and found no incompatibility changes.  '$ cd ~' works from 
within my bash shell, so I don't think that's an issue.  I don't think 
it's a PDL issue, but rather think that it has to do with my local 
configuration (which isn't tweaked in any way from the stock Mandriva 
configuration).  Any ideas?
thanks,
Derek