I re-read your posts and the relevant man pages but still don't understand why it should be an error. "use re qw(eval)", to me, means anything goes, security be damned.

If you convince me otherwise then I'll track down my bug report and fix it up. If you don't then the people fixing the bug can decide.

Right - I saw your perlbug. Its up to whoever wants to actually tackle the thing. Initially when you posted the problem I was tempted to run that through gdb to see what was different but real life caught up with me and convinced me to spend my time elsewhere.