I think most would agree that it is easily identifyable as an issue in perl v5.8.8.

This was a known limitation of older Perl's (pre-5.10 from memory).

Basically, any warning or error resulting from an if or elsif condition within an if/elsif/else cascade was reported with the line number of the opening if.

There are at least a couple of threads around here -- including one of my own -- that talk of this. If I succeed in digging one or more of them up, I'll update.