It's a know fact that Perl sometimes does not report the offending line correctly, being off by 16 lines however is impressive. Can you check whether this still happens with 5.12.2 and/or blead? I've tried to recreate your problem, but anything I try of the form

    my $state = 1;
    state = 2;
[download]

results in a syntax error in the second line. Can you create a small example which gives this off-by-a-lot error?