Am I missing something? With perl 5.8.8 in linux I get an error:

poletti@PolettiX:~/sviluppo/perl$ perl pathological.pl
Missing $ on loop variable at pathological.pl line 1.
poletti@PolettiX:~/sviluppo/perl$ 
poletti@PolettiX:~/sviluppo/perl$ 
poletti@PolettiX:~/sviluppo/perl$ cat pathological.pl
for qw(Whom the bell tolls) {}            # huh? for qw() ?
continue { print "$_\n"; next }
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while the OP's example...