I've encountered the same problem and blogged about it. It's a bug in old Perl versions, but read the blog post, I've found a workaround. Flavio's comment points to the corresponding bug report.

($q=q:Sq=~/;[c](.)(.)/;chr(-||-|5+lengthSq)`"S|oS2"`map{chr |+ord
}map{substrSq`S_+|`|}3E|-|`7**2-3:)=~y+S|`+$1,++print+eval$q,q,a,

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In reply to Re: RegExps failing on (some) 5.8.8 by choroba
in thread RegExps failing on (some) 5.8.8 by tlhackque

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