I mentioned that I had "fixed" it, which involved doing exactly what you pointed out. It was kind of odd that strict didn't get this one, so there were no bombs, apart from the feverish memory consumption.

I didn't post the fix because I wanted to see if it was obvious or not, which considering it took the third reply to "solve", I suppose it really isn't.

As a point of curiosity, does the broken example chew up all your RAM? I'm using Perl 5.6.1 on RedHat 7.2 i386 and it's swap city.