So here is a real stumper.
I am maintaining a perl code base, and I appear to have a case of the creeping 1s.
Somewhere, there is a piece of code that breaks the Exporter. Once that code has loaded, I encounter Exporter failings like this:

Can't export symbol: 1varnameA

where $varnameA is a key in the @EXPORT array. An example array is: 

@EXPORT = qw($varnameA %varnameB &varnameC);

[download]
I'm using 5.6.0 or 5.6.1 depending on the machine, and the complaint comes from Exporter::Heavy line 174: 
    foreach $sym (@imports) {
        # shortcut for the common case of no type character
        (*{"${callpkg}::$sym"} = \&{"${pkg}::$sym"}, next)
            unless $sym =~ s/^(\W)//;
        $type = $1;
        *{"${callpkg}::$sym"} =
            $type eq '&' ? \&{"${pkg}::$sym"} :
            $type eq '$' ? \${"${pkg}::$sym"} :
            $type eq '@' ? \@{"${pkg}::$sym"} :
            $type eq '%' ? \%{"${pkg}::$sym"} :
            $type eq '*' ?  *{"${pkg}::$sym"} :
            do { require Carp; Carp::croak("Can't export symbol: $type
+$sym") };
    }

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This became so irritating on one machine that a fellow coder of mine rewrote the code to not use $1 because that magic variable would, in fact, mysteriously have a value of 1. We would even print $sym so we could see what names it was iterating through - and it was correct. The $sym string would be "$varnameA". The order of the @EXPORT array did not matter. Naturally, if you didn't prefix an identifier with a type (a sub) then it would work fine.

I should make it clear that although we patched our Exporter::Heavy on one machine, that did not solve all of our problems..there were still a few creeping 1s, but at least we could get our code to run. I've been searching through our code trying to find what is breaking it, but there is a lot of code there...
Any ideas? Anyone ever seen this behavior before?

In reply to Exporter failing - the case of the creeping 1s by jargon

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