in reply to Re^5: hard-to-understand taint error
in thread hard-to-understand taint error

Oops. It took me a while to figure out that you were using square brackets. By the time I figured that out, it looks like I had changed from [@-Z] (interpolation of var @- plus "Z") to [\@-Z] (short for [\@A-Z]).

In ASCII-based encodings, "@" is "\x40", the character before "A".