I reported and fixed the bug. All it took was removing a statement in pp_hot.c that said, in English, "if the pattern match is happening in list context, don't make copies of $1, $2, etc."

So in the next version of Perl, your bug will be no more. It was a peculiar bug... behavior-wise, at least. I guess they thought that if you're storing the digit variables in other variables, there's no need to make copies of them, but rather, link those digit variables to parts of the string directly.

japhy -- Perl and Regex Hacker