Internally speaking, the problem is because only "control ops" (Cop's) have a line number recorded with them. To Perl, an if-elsif-else sequence is one big logical operator, and that statement starts on a specific line. If there's a problem evaluating something in the operator itself, the line number the statement starts on is used. That's why

if ($x) {
  print 1;
}
elsif ($x != 2) {
  print $y;
}
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will warn that there's an uninitialized value at line 1 (even though it's at line 4), but it will properly tell you about the uninitialized value on line 5 (because each new statement in Perl is a new Cop).

A similar problem is found in this case:

print 1,
2,
3,
undef,
4;
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Even though the code spans five lines, error messages will refer to the line the statement started on.

It's not going to be easy to fix this bug, methinks.

Update: but a good kludgy work-around is to use a do { ; ... } block!

if ($x) { ... }
elsif (do {; $x == 2}) { ... }
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That properly reports the warning for line 2. It's super-kludge, though.

_____________________________________________________
Jeff[japhy]Pinyan: Perl, regex, and perl hacker, who'd like a job (NYC-area)
s++=END;++y(;-P)}y js++=;shajsj<++y(p-q)}?print:??;