mostly just greedy parsing so it always pulls in the trailing {...} to make a hash deref

Similarly, if the lexer in the regexp engine doesn't find a closing curly, the opening curly automatically loses its meta aspect...

... prints 1. This could be the source of annoying errors if you're not careful. The explanation I received was that in terms of costs and benefits, to maintain sufficient context to maintain the ability to report the error would be too much of overhead during the parse. Or something like that, I'm a little hazy on the details by now.

Nor can I recall having been bitten by this behaviour, so the decision as it stands was probably correct.