Thanks - I'm slightly glad to know that it's a bug and not Yet Another Obscure PERL feature that I'd missed. :-)

I ran across it because I was trying to run down a failure to match a pattern, where the pattern was stored (uncompiled) in a variable. I printed out the variable in the debugger - although I'd composed it with \t it prints with \cI. So I was cutting and pasting, trying to narrow down where the pattern match was failing - and got horribly bitten.

Such is war and programming. Meta-question - where is the someplace to report bugs like that?

throop