I've seen some weird syntax error-ish bugs around subs that are prototyped to take a sub-ref as an argument, which in recent perls lets you supply what looks like a block as their argument, just like your run_main presumably is. I *thought* that that was fixed in 5.8.*, but maybe it was still present in some early 5.8 releases.

The fix in my case was to make the code block an explicit sub-ref, thus ...

run_main sub { ... };

In reply to Re: syntax error - perl-5.8 only by DrHyde
in thread syntax error - perl-5.8 only by syphilis

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