I understand that the ideal thing here is to upgrade to 5.12 across the board, but there are many machines involved and that's not possible at the moment.

You should check if it was fixed by 5.8.9. Upgrading to 5.8.9 would be quite simple as it wouldn't require modules to be reinstalled.

Am I hitting something known?

You've shown that it was fixed, so it would seem it was known to someone.

I still wonder why.

Probably because the programmer overlooked something.


In reply to Re: Does perl 5.8.2 have a bug with 'redo' statement by ikegami
in thread Does perl 5.8.2 have a bug with 'redo' statement by Mubby

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":



  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.