G'day cavac,

"Sometimes, yes."

Was it just in the range of Perl versions that I indicated? Did it consistently happen in those ranges?

"... at least one person thought this could be a problem big enough to write some code to warn you."

I'm trying to determine why it was a "big enough" problem; and why it was only such a problem across three Perl versions.

"... if you are using vim ..."

Thanks for the tip; however, this problem occurs in legacy $work code (probably over a decade old). I do use vim but I didn't write this code, nor am I its maintainer.