Just a quick note on using lexicals in those regex closures. The trouble was that the lexicals were seen sometimes. I could not find out when they were seen I<exactly>. If those regex code constructs worked alright as closures, they would have seen the lexicals I<all the time> because the closures were declared and used I<in the same scope> that the lexical was declared. What happened was, usually the first two times the regular expression engine executed the closure, the lexical would be incremented, and after that, the code would still be executed (print() worked), but the lexicals weren't touched. (I tried it with a tied lexical that warns when touched, too.)

Steffen