It's a know fact that Perl sometimes does not report the offending line correctly, being off by 16 lines however is impressive. Can you check whether this still happens with 5.12.2 and/or blead? I've tried to recreate your problem, but anything I try of the form 
    my $state = 1;
    state = 2;

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results in a syntax error in the second line. Can you create a small example which gives this off-by-a-lot error?

In reply to Re: Interesting: a genuine Perl-bug by JavaFan
in thread Interesting: a genuine Perl-bug by locked_user sundialsvc4

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